I know it's a running joke how many monad tutorials and analogies there are. And I get the humor and very much enjoy the joke. However, I was able to gain a so

I know it's a running joke how many monad tutorials and analogies there are. And I get the humor and very much enjoy the joke. However, I was able to gain a solid understanding of monads by working through a number of those tutorials. Over that period of time, I came to suspect, and then eventually confirm, that I had previously created my own monad for a particular purpose in C# (my case was checking the value of something in an XML tree, an attribute of an element of an element of an element, where the attribute might be missing, or its parent element might be missing, or its parent, and so on. So it was much like Bracha's ".?" sugar example). So, monad tutorials actually (eventually) made the concept clear to me. It's fun to make fun of them, and they deserve to take a little heat, but we have to give them credit where credit is due too.