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by aesyondu 1612 days ago
> These laws can be illustrated with simple examples, and don't require any deep mathematical knowledge to comprehend.

If you could share some of these examples, or perhaps a link to those examples, I'd greatly appreciate it.
2 comments
kaba0 1612 days ago
I wrote an explanation for them here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28844533

Though I’m not the best at explaining things, hopefully it makes sense.

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aesyondu 1612 days ago
Oh okay. So what I'm understanding from your post is that, a monad is just a way of applying the return value of one function as a parameter for another function.

Sorry if I misunderstood. I've been reading many explanations for monads, but insight seem to elude me.

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kaba0 1612 days ago
Well, mostly - but I think this wrapping of things is the more important part, allowing us to manipulate the inner things without actually being able to touch those.

For example, mapping some function over a Result type that may or may not have a value in an iterative manner would make me check for the existence of the value, unpack, and apply function. If we have a Monad abstraction then I can just map my function which will be applied in case of a result, or the whole thing will remain None - it is safe either way. And one other useful part is the uniformity of functions working on monads - I can use the same ones for a List, Result, or any similar container, IO, State monads and even Async is a monad.

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foldr 1612 days ago
The explanation on the Haskell Wiki isn’t too obscure (if you already know Haskell) and has examples:

https://wiki.haskell.org/Monad_laws

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