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That’s what Monads are for


After a heavy weekend of squash, my Magnesium and Zinc depleted body in all its tiredness offers the following universal law of pseudo-scientific claims for analysis:

If someone claims that the concept of Monads (a computation model offered by Category Theory) are for side-effects, then you can be absolutely certain that the person making the claim has absolutely no idea what Monads are for. Not even the slightest. You should consider their credibility on the topic to be absolutely zero.

Comments? Does this count as the ever common Monad Tutorial? :)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 10:31 am and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “That’s what Monads are for”

  1. Sohail Says:
    February 25th, 2008 at 11:01 am

    So what are they for?

  2. Colin Says:
    February 25th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

    I think it counts. It’s more useful than most.

  3. Germán B. Says:
    February 25th, 2008 at 11:42 pm

    I don’t remember having seen that claim, but I’ve seen the claim that side effects are one of the things monads can be used for.

  4. Reg Braithwaite Says:
    February 26th, 2008 at 1:08 am

    I though that Monads were for abstracting the meaning of function application :-)

  5. Sanity Says:
    March 12th, 2008 at 8:17 am

    While its interesting to know what they aren’t, I’d be more interested in a good lay-man’s description of what they are.

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