Monad in plain English?

Posted by fig-gnuton on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by fig-gnuton
Published on 2010-04-24T13:42:54Z Indexed on 2010/04/24 13:53 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 337

Filed under:

monads

|

functional-programming

In terms that an OOP programmer would understand (without any functional programming background), what is a monad?

What problem does it solve and what are the most common places it's used?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about monads

mtl, transformers, monads-fd, monadLib, and the paradox of choice

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hackage has several packages for monad transformers: mtl: Monad transformer library transformers: Concrete functor and monad transformers monads-fd: Monad classes, using functional dependencies monads-tf: Monad classes, using type families monadLib: A collection of monad transformers. mtl-tf: Monad… >>> More
How I understood monads, part 1/2: sleepless and self-loathing in Seattle

as seen on ASP.net Weblogs - Search for 'ASP.net Weblogs'
For some time now, I had been noticing some interest for monads, mostly in the form of unintelligible (to me) blog posts and comments saying “oh, yeah, that’s a monad” about random stuff as if it were absolutely obvious and if I didn’t know what they were talking about, I was probably an uneducated… >>> More
Resources for learning Monads, Functors, Monoids, Arrows etc

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Can you people please suggest some good books / weblinks from where I can get to learn about above mentioned concepts? (Please note that I am a Java programmer and have NO prior experience with functional programming. I have been studying Scala since last one month and would appreciate the resources… >>> More
Can anyone explain Monads?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I think I understand what 'Maybe Monads' are, but I'm not sure about the other types. >>> More
Help a C# developer understand: What is a monad?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
There is a lot of talk about monads these days. I have read a few articles / blog posts, but I can't go far enough with their examples to fully grasp the concept. The reason is that monads are a functional language concept, and thus the examples are in languages I haven't worked with (since I haven't… >>> More

Related posts about functional-programming

Introducing functional programming constructs in non-functional programming languages

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
This question has been going through my mind quite a lot lately and since I haven't found a convincing answer to it I would like to know if other users of this site have thought about it as well. In the recent years, even though OOP is still the most popular programming paradigm, functional programming… >>> More
Functional programming constructs in non-functional programming languages

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
This question has been going through my mind quite a lot lately and since I haven't found a convincing answer to it I would like to know if other users of this site have thought about it as well. In the recent years, even though OOP is still the most popular programming paradigm, functional programming… >>> More
Does functional programming mandate new naming conventions?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I recently started studying functional programming using Haskell and came upon this article on the official Haskell wiki: How to read Haskell. The article claims that short variable names such as x, xs, and f are fitting for Haskell code, because of conciseness and abstraction. In essence, it claims… >>> More
pitfalls/disadvantages of functional programming

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
When would you NOT want to use functional programming? What is it not so good at? I am more looking for disadvantages of the paradigm as a whole, not things like "not widely used", or "no good debugger available". Those answers may be correct as of now, but they deal with FP being a new concept (an… >>> More
Should functional programming be taught before imperative programming?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
It seems to me that functional programming is a great thing. It eliminates state and makes it much easier to automatically make code run in parallel. Many programmers who were first taught imperative programming styles find it very difficult to learn functional programming, because it is so different… >>> More