This is extremely well put. I think the curse of knowledge is at work in both with monads and C preprocessor hacks, they both make sense only within a domain-s

This is extremely well put. I think the curse of knowledge is at work in both with monads and C preprocessor hacks, they both make sense only within a domain-specific context - if you’re living and breathing in that context, you can appreciate the techniques. At the same time, if you never step outside you can forget that programming is a tool for humans, and think that your tools, systems and languages are infallible.