I've used the Option class in Scala, which, if I understand correctly, is a direct translation of the Maybe monad, and honestly, I have an extremely difficult t

I've used the Option class in Scala, which, if I understand correctly, is a direct translation of the Maybe monad, and honestly, I have an extremely difficult time trying to understand your post. I don't blame you, either. I've had a very had time understanding every explanation of monads on the web, even though on the surface they look like they'd be really easy to understand. http://lamp.epfl.ch/~emir/bqbase/2005/01/20/monad.html http://lamp.epfl.ch/~emir/bqbase/2005/01/20/monad.html has an explanation from scala's perspective. I can understand the first part when the author describes a monad as an object with a polymorphic type, a map function, a flatten function, and a singleton constructor function. Everything they said beyond that goes right over my head.