3 ms·

> Rant posts, on the other hand, have little value IMHO. Sure ;=) But Haskell's explanations of Monads is in my experience really no adequate. Category Theory

> Rant posts, on the other hand, have little value IMHO. Sure ;=) But Haskell's explanations of Monads is in my experience really no adequate. Category Theory is the underlying since theory, but do you need to know about mechanics and gears to drive a car? There are explanations of Monads which are much much easier to understand for most people (people not having much to do with Category Theory). E.g. by now the concept of map, flat_map is fairly wide spread in most programming languages and you can teach about Monads in terms of that fairly easy. And then add the additional abstraction layer used in context of Monads like abstracting over the "external world state" (IO) and "combining computation descriptions".

dotdi 6y ago
> but do you need to know about mechanics and gears to drive a car? Depends on what you are trying to do. You don't need that knowledge in order to drive a car, but there are drivers that absolutely should know about mechanics and gears.
davorak 6y ago
> But Haskell's explanations of Monads is in my experience really no adequate. Category Theory is the underlying since theory, but do you need to know about mechanics and gears to drive a car? Monads are part of the underlying category theory. So asking for a full explanation of Monads you are asking to explain part of the "mechanics and gears" in your car analogy. > E.g. by now the concept of map, flat_map is fairly wide spread in most programming languages and you can teach about Monads in terms of that fairly easy. And then add the additional abstraction layer used in context of Monads like abstracting over the "external world state" (IO) and "combining computation descriptions". I think I agree with your main point here that teaching the internal details first is often not the optimal method. You do not need to know how Monads work to use them to great effect in Haskell and other languages.

dotdi 6y ago

> but do you need to know about mechanics and gears to drive a car? Depends on what you are trying to do. You don't need that knowledge in order to drive a car, but there are drivers that absolutely should know about mechanics and gears.

davorak 6y ago

> But Haskell's explanations of Monads is in my experience really no adequate. Category Theory is the underlying since theory, but do you need to know about mechanics and gears to drive a car? Monads are part of the underlying category theory. So asking for a full explanation of Monads you are asking to explain part of the "mechanics and gears" in your car analogy. > E.g. by now the concept of map, flat_map is fairly wide spread in most programming languages and you can teach about Monads in terms of that fairly easy. And then add the additional abstraction layer used in context of Monads like abstracting over the "external world state" (IO) and "combining computation descriptions". I think I agree with your main point here that teaching the internal details first is often not the optimal method. You do not need to know how Monads work to use them to great effect in Haskell and other languages.