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Here's an interesting article about the "Fallacy of Monad Tutorials" and why most metaphors fail: https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti... The key insight here is: there are no shortcuts. Most metaphors are useful but limited. Once a metaphor "clicks" for a person, they forget all the work it took them for the concept to really click, and think the shortcut will help other people: "Monads are like burritos! If only other people understood this, they would get them!". > "But now Joe goes and writes a monad tutorial called “Monads are Burritos,” under the well-intentioned but mistaken assumption that if other people read his magical insight, learning about monads will be a snap for them. “Monads are easy,” Joe writes. “Think of them as burritos.” Joe hides all the actual details about types and such because those are scary, and people will learn better if they can avoid all that difficult and confusing stuff. Of course, exactly the opposite is true, and all Joe has done is make it harder for people to learn about monads, because now they have to spend a week thinking that monads are burritos and getting utterly confused, and then a week trying to forget about the burrito analogy, before they can actually get down to the business of learning about monads." Already in this comments section I see this kind of misunderstandings: "monads are containers with values in them, almost like objects", "monads are for effectful computations", "monads are for imposing a sequential order", etc. These are all particular uses of monads, but not what monads are. |