This article made it all click for me: https://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_monads_in_pictures.html https://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-fu

This article made it all click for me: https://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_monads_in_pictures.html https://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and... Not sure why, but treating everything as boxes makes all of the fancy FP abstractions on top make sense to me. I think for C/assembly, the higher levels of abstractions aren't something you'll care about, because they're too costly. However, and apologies for the Rust code in a C++ thread, but I wrote this today and I think it demonstrates either the value or the horror of monads et al. let channel = app .channel .map(|c| Channel::from_str(&c)) .transpose()? .unwrap_or(Channel::Stable); In plain words, I have a box that might contain a String (app.channel, which is `Option<String>` in Rust, or roughly `char *` in C). If it does have a String, I want to parse the String into a `Channel` enum and return an error if that fails. If it doesn't contain one, I want to use a default enum value of `Channel::Stable`. The equivalent Rust code written in a more C-like style would be more verbose, something like this: let channel = if app.channel.is_some() { let parsed = Channel::from_str(&app.channel.unwrap()); if parsed.is_ok() { parsed.unwrap() } else { return Err(parsed); } } else { Channel::Stable }