I took me several years to grok monads. I even learned some category theory to try and get there (it didn't really help, but I do think it was useful for some

I took me several years to grok monads. I even learned some category theory to try and get there (it didn't really help, but I do think it was useful for some other almost programming related things). The nice thing about monads with respect to the haskell programming thing is that you don't have to know why they work to get their benefit. However, if you wanted to build your own you probably do need to grok them. However, I'm not convinced that monads are the best way to proceed on the most part in programming advancements. The immutable/mutable tracking, affine types, and borrow checker in Rust seems like it would help prevent a lot of the same types of bugs that pure FP does, but without the cost of needing to have a monadic effect system (and Rust is a more familiar style of programming than the State monad with a host of monad transformers). I'm hoping for optional affine types and more immutable data structures to become the norm more than I am monad usage.