You really don't need to think about monads or functional programming to have option and result. The focus on explaining these in the context of sum types and m

You really don't need to think about monads or functional programming to have option and result. The focus on explaining these in the context of sum types and monads only serves to distract most people. A list is a monad and people use them every day and they are fine. > Having a (val, err) tuple IS more easy than returning a monad. Arguments about which concept is easier for people to understand pretty quickly descend into subjectivity but I don't believe this is universally true. Why am I getting a value when there's an error? What do I return as my value when returning errors? Explaining to someone that a function returns (val, err) and only one of these values will be significant is more or less the same as describing a result. Option is even simpler. It's a list that can have at most one item. Or, you know how in python you can set a variable to None? Here's how to do it in a strongly typed language.