There was a particular moment I remember from Milewski's monad video, where likened monad tutorials to a situation where you arrive on a remote island and the i

There was a particular moment I remember from Milewski's monad video, where likened monad tutorials to a situation where you arrive on a remote island and the islanders ask you to explain what a function is. One's first instinct might be to give a bunch of examples, for instance, you can have a function that takes a list of fishermen and order them by the number of fishes they caught, or a function to turn barley into beer, etc. Upon hearing this, the islanders think that functions must be some magical panacea, and so you backtrack on that and try to talk about functions as being like animals, they take input and produce output (good luck with function composition). The situation is like that with monads. They are far removed from the world of programming (the fact that there were connections at all to effects was remarkable!), but as such, you have to learn the ambient theory in which monads reside to really grok it.