[Planktonne]

I find that a lot of developers assume that a failed explanation is due to a lack of precision, and so they try and teach with long, detailed, overly-precise explanations.

Precise explanations are fantastic for people who already understand the concept: they let them go a level deeper and explore the underlying truth. However, they're intimidating and unhelpful for people who have yet to grasp the concept.

For concepts, analogy works best - 'code is like a...' along with minimal examples of ideas in accessible situations for your audience. Alice and Bob, etc.

Teaching code is about finding the right metaphor for your students - whether that's recipes or language or robots or something else - not bashing at them with "All told, a monad in X is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors of X, with product × replaced by composition of endofunctors and unit set by the identity endofunctor."