Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Monadic Burritos

There is an article about certain types of tutorials called "Abstraction, intuition, and the “monad tutorial fallacy”" which mentions a fictional tutorial that try to explain monads by saying that they are like burritos. Part of the problem with monads in particular is the mystique that surrounds them because they are an "advanced" concept, although like many things they are much simpler than they are made out to be. I have to admit that it *was* hard to learn enough category theory to really understand them, but the concept as it is used in functional programming is very understandable.
Strangely the joke that monads are like burritos is closer to the truth then anyone realized at first- the post on The Universe of Discourse titled "Monads are like burritos" explains that burritos do in fact form a monad, which the author of the original article didn't even intend. What a delicious coincidence.

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