> Isn't a monad effectively just a [something]? I think this article responds well to that kind of "it's so obvious!" flash of insight: "The Monad Tutorial Fal

> Isn't a monad effectively just a [something]? I think this article responds well to that kind of "it's so obvious!" flash of insight: "The Monad Tutorial Fallacy", https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy/ https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti... Basically, you have to build your own intuition. Examples of monads are just examples, what matters is how you reached that insight, and there's no shortcut for that; you cannot simply be told that "monads are like wrappers" (or burritos, read below). Like the article states: > “Monads are easy,” Joe writes. “Think of them as burritos.” Joe hides all the actual details about types and such because those are scary, and people will learn better if they can avoid all that difficult and confusing stuff. Of course, exactly the opposite is true, and all Joe has done is make it harder for people to learn about monads, because now they have to spend a week thinking that monads are burritos and getting utterly confused [...] > What I term the “monad tutorial fallacy,” then, consists in failing to recognize the critical role that struggling through fundamental details plays in the building of intuition. This, I suspect, is also one of the things that separates good teachers from poor ones. If you ever find yourself frustrated and astounded that someone else does not grasp a concept as easily and intuitively as you do, even after you clearly explain your intuition to them (“look, it’s really quite simple,” you say…) then you are suffering from the monad tutorial fallacy.