In my opinion, the only way to understand monads is to use them. They'll be a little weird at first, but the type system will guarantee you're using them in the

In my opinion, the only way to understand monads is to use them. They'll be a little weird at first, but the type system will guarantee you're using them in the right way. The thing is that you don't really need to understand how a given monad works under the hood; you just need to know how it's going to act when you use it. For example, I couldn't write the State monad instance right now, not without quite a bit of puzzling anyway. But I use the State monad all the time, because I know how it's going to act: addToState :: Int -> State Int () addToState number = do currentState <- get put $ number + currentState How is this working exactly? Well who cares. I know that once this function is called, my state will have been incremented by the given amount.