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I disagree that anything on your "so do" list is hard to explain. At least, I feel like I understand all of them, but I still don't understand Monads. And I'v

I disagree that anything on your "so do" list is hard to explain. At least, I feel like I understand all of them, but I still don't understand Monads. And I've probably spent 10x the amount of time reading (and still not comprehending) Monad tutorials than I have all of the other concepts combined.

kelseyfrog 5y ago
I'm curious how much time you're spent "doing monads" compared to reading about monads. The reason that I bring this up is that monads didn't click for me until I had hands on experience with a few different monad instances and could see the abstraction take shape in different ways. If that doesn't apply to you, that's ok too. It's fun to understand other people's methods of conceptualization.
- ninkendo 5y ago
  I have no idea how much time I’ve spent doing monads because I still don’t know what they are. It’s possible I’ve done “monadic” things in the code I already write, but I have no idea. I don’t know any Haskell at all, and it seems to be the only language out there where people think monads are a thing you need to learn, so I definitely have no motivation to learn them outside of curiosity. But I am curious about them, enough to read every tutorial I come across about them. But I still have no idea what they are.
  - kelseyfrog 5y ago
    It's definitely possible you've already done monadic things in code. If it's any consolation, I would not have ever been able to grasp monads by reading tutorials alone and the monad laws are simply too abstract for me to have envision a concrete usage. I learned without touching Haskell at all and it's my opinion is that Scala + Cats is a much easier onramp to monads than Haskell. You sound like a kind and curious person. If you ever want a one-on-one walkthrough please reach out to me (email in bio). Everyone deserves the chance to understand something if they want to.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Have you tried to explain them to somebody learning to program? Explaining things to people that already knows them is always easy.
- ninkendo 5y ago
  Yes I have, I helped teach some CS courses in college, plus I myself learned them in my very earliest days of programming. It's pretty common for those to be among the first concepts taught. I'd say that your list is full of things that have practical examples when you consider how real, physical computers work. Boolean logic can be shown by example by showing physical transistor circuits, and I'd argue that people can understand them quite easily. Pointers/variables can be shown by explaining how memory addressing works on real machines, and what CPU instructions correspond with the actual code you're writing. Monads however, seem to be this purely abstract mathematical concept that comes from CS-as-a-math-discipline, which although useful, requires you understand ton more theoretical background before you can approach it. At least that's my experience -- I still don't understand them and every tutorial I've read either makes them look like magic (ie. doesn't actually explain them) or tries to take a mathematically rigorous approach and I get lost in the weeds. I know intuitiveness is very subjective, but I'd wager that by numbers, many more people are able to understand pointers/mutable variables/macros/boolean logic/etc more easily than they can Monads.
  - chongli 5y ago
    You don’t need much of any theoretical mathematical knowledge to understand monads. What you need is comfort and experience reading mathematical definitions. For most people, that means they’ve studied a lot of math. The famous John von Neumann quote is bang on here: Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. —- John von Neumann
    - chobytes 5y ago
      I agree. Almost all of the difficulty is just not getting how mathematicians think or communicate. Honestly I think a lot of effort is wasted starting with this stuff rather than more motivated examples... But the interest is the harder thing to come by, so at least they're learning something.

kelseyfrog 5y ago

I'm curious how much time you're spent "doing monads" compared to reading about monads. The reason that I bring this up is that monads didn't click for me until I had hands on experience with a few different monad instances and could see the abstraction take shape in different ways. If that doesn't apply to you, that's ok too. It's fun to understand other people's methods of conceptualization.

ninkendo 5y ago
I have no idea how much time I’ve spent doing monads because I still don’t know what they are. It’s possible I’ve done “monadic” things in the code I already write, but I have no idea. I don’t know any Haskell at all, and it seems to be the only language out there where people think monads are a thing you need to learn, so I definitely have no motivation to learn them outside of curiosity. But I am curious about them, enough to read every tutorial I come across about them. But I still have no idea what they are.
- kelseyfrog 5y ago
  It's definitely possible you've already done monadic things in code. If it's any consolation, I would not have ever been able to grasp monads by reading tutorials alone and the monad laws are simply too abstract for me to have envision a concrete usage. I learned without touching Haskell at all and it's my opinion is that Scala + Cats is a much easier onramp to monads than Haskell. You sound like a kind and curious person. If you ever want a one-on-one walkthrough please reach out to me (email in bio). Everyone deserves the chance to understand something if they want to.

marcosdumay 5y ago

Have you tried to explain them to somebody learning to program? Explaining things to people that already knows them is always easy.

ninkendo 5y ago
Yes I have, I helped teach some CS courses in college, plus I myself learned them in my very earliest days of programming. It's pretty common for those to be among the first concepts taught. I'd say that your list is full of things that have practical examples when you consider how real, physical computers work. Boolean logic can be shown by example by showing physical transistor circuits, and I'd argue that people can understand them quite easily. Pointers/variables can be shown by explaining how memory addressing works on real machines, and what CPU instructions correspond with the actual code you're writing. Monads however, seem to be this purely abstract mathematical concept that comes from CS-as-a-math-discipline, which although useful, requires you understand ton more theoretical background before you can approach it. At least that's my experience -- I still don't understand them and every tutorial I've read either makes them look like magic (ie. doesn't actually explain them) or tries to take a mathematically rigorous approach and I get lost in the weeds. I know intuitiveness is very subjective, but I'd wager that by numbers, many more people are able to understand pointers/mutable variables/macros/boolean logic/etc more easily than they can Monads.
- chongli 5y ago
  You don’t need much of any theoretical mathematical knowledge to understand monads. What you need is comfort and experience reading mathematical definitions. For most people, that means they’ve studied a lot of math. The famous John von Neumann quote is bang on here: Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. —- John von Neumann
  - chobytes 5y ago
    I agree. Almost all of the difficulty is just not getting how mathematicians think or communicate. Honestly I think a lot of effort is wasted starting with this stuff rather than more motivated examples... But the interest is the harder thing to come by, so at least they're learning something.