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by vertex-four 3186 days ago
The problem is that Haskell developers like to push monads as the solution to a problem most developers in other languages don't actually have, so discovering the problem that's being solved is the difficult bit.

Of course, this doesn't happen with other niche solutions because other niche solutions don't have an entire popular language which nearly-precisely encodes the problems monads are good at solving.
1 comments
hikarudo 3186 days ago
It seems you're talking about the IO monad specifically, not about monads in general. Other monads, like Maybe and List, absolutely occur in programs written by "most developers in other languages", whether they perceive them as monads or not.

For instance, a pointer type in C is like a "Maybe a" in Haskell, because a pointer can always be null (Nothing).

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vertex-four 3186 days ago
So how does knowing that Maybe is a monad solve a problem for anybody not programming Haskell?
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hikarudo 3185 days ago
I guess it helps in two ways.

First, if you realize you have a computation that can either return a value or a "special" value that means it failed, you can model this using a Maybe-like data structure.

Second, if in some part of your program you are already using a data structure that is isomorphic to Maybe, you might stand to gain from using the same interface used with the Maybe monad in Haskell (or any other monad), namely 'bind' and 'return', or similar forms.

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