My interpretation of your analogy is that if there were a resource which presented monad-related concepts in a manner a working Scala programmer is likely to re

My interpretation of your analogy is that if there were a resource which presented monad-related concepts in a manner a working Scala programmer is likely to relate with, as opposed to theory laden texts, then the usefulness of these concepts might be better received in general. Fair enough. So here is a book which does precisely that: "Functional Programming in Scala" (ISBN-13: 978-1617290657) The authors incrementally present FP concepts, including monads, in a very approachable style. I can say first hand that this book does not require a heavy mathematical background (off hand, I don't think there are any formal proofs in it).