[noelwelsh]

You really don't need to introduce groups or other algebraic structures to understand monads, and if your goal is to teach monads I believe it is harmful to do this.

The average programmer is much more likely to encounter monads (e.g. error handling, promises), than they are to encounter groups in an abstract context. Unnecessary maths will drive people away. Making a big deal of axioms, reasoning, and all this stuff that functional programmers love (including myself) is the approach that has been tried for the last 20 years, and it has failed to reach the mainstream. If you want to reach the average programmer you need to solve problems they care about in a language (both programming and natural) they understand.

[malinens]

Until functional people stop speak so elitist ("me" vs average programmer), people will be driven away from these concepts

[james_s_tayler]

Elitist functional programmers are probably just average programmers that didn't run away screaming at the first sign of math, but instead just confronted what was presented to them and took the time and effort to properly grok the material.