As someone who's strongly in the "top down" camp by observation, I'm about to refute an interpretation of what that means. Everyone who's learned Haskell reall

As someone who's strongly in the "top down" camp by observation, I'm about to refute an interpretation of what that means. Everyone who's learned Haskell really well understands exactly that you learn monads by example, not abstraction. Abstractions need both motivation and "point samples" which describe good reasons for their particular brand of abstract behavior to be meaningful. I don't think at all that the "top down" side actually must work top down, but instead simply values the tools you get when you reach the top, i.e. strong reasoning capabilities and metaphor connections to algebra. I really want to change the Crockford Monad Curse to instead read that "Anyone who's just learned monads is suddenly incapable of explaining them". When they first "click" you become obsessed with the abstraction as a thing instead of using it as a tool to better leverage patterns which turn up in real examples. Until you shake that by just using monads so frequently that you're damn bored you cannot properly explain them.