Think of monads as a design pattern. The reason they're named in Haskell is because that language allows you to name a lot of abstract things that most of the t

Think of monads as a design pattern. The reason they're named in Haskell is because that language allows you to name a lot of abstract things that most of the time are either ignored or not made explicit. A monad is a type that keeps some value contained, which is like you said a big part of object-oriented programming. Monads are the use of objects for encapsulation, but a bit more extensible than in regular object-oriented languages. The Maybe monad, called Option in the article, is a type that can hold either some value or Nothing. You have to do a null check to get the value, but because it's a monad, you can use the generic function bind to automate this check. The IO monad is just another application of this idea of containing something - all IO operations have the world as their input and output. This is implicit in most languages, but in Haskell it's explicit. Any value you get from the outside world is hidden inside an IO action, but you can use bind to automate the required passing around of the world. One possible reason for confusion is that you can explicitly do null checks with Maybe but you can't explicitly thread the world around with IO. Maybe's method of direct access is public, but IO's is private. Because the /only/ way to get a value out of an IO operation is with bind, you are guaranteed to have all side effects contained in IO actions.