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It's interesting to me that the explanation you give is one that I would call a category-theoretic one, but you see it "in the context of programming". There ar
by noelwelsh 8y ago
It's interesting to me that the explanation you give is one that I would call a category-theoretic one, but you see it "in the context of programming". There are so many different views on monads and their ilk. (FWIW, for a programming based explanation I would talk about sequencing operations.)
- mikekchar 8y agoYeah... I really just wanted to translate "monoid in the category of endofunctors" into vocabulary that the average programmer would understand. IMHO the article jumped through a bunch of unnecessary hoops even if you wanted to know what that sentence meant.
- marcosdumay 8y agoThere are some people that can intuitively understand "monoid in the category of endofunctors", but there are many that don't. I find it much easier to understand a monad as a general implementation of the interpreter pattern, a monoid as a generalization of things that can be concatenated, and an endofunctor as a generalization of a container. That a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors then become an interesting property, not some ab-initio definition.