Actually, I'm pretty sure the reason most people have trouble understanding monads in Haskell is because they haven't learned what typeclasses are yet. Once you

Actually, I'm pretty sure the reason most people have trouble understanding monads in Haskell is because they haven't learned what typeclasses are yet. Once you know what a typeclass is, the rest is pretty straightforward. I tried to explain it here ( http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/erzh1/monads_are_not_metaphors/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/erzh1/monads_ar... ) a while ago, which might be helpful for some people. Although, the version of List's >>= function is much easier to understand here ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Advanced_monads#The_List_monad http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Advanced_monads#The_Lis... ) than the one I pulled out of GHC's library code.