[PartiallyTyped]

> Maybe I'm wrong, but I think all the talk around weird ideas like Functors, Monads, etc., are mostly red herrings and aren't that applicable to most everyday software engineering tasks.

They are a red herring. In most cases, all you need to know about a monad is that it defines some kind of transformation of the enclosed data by applying a function onto it that returns a Monad of the same kind.

e.g. the list monad [a] says that if you bind it with a function f: a -> [b] (ie a function that takes a value and returns a list of b), the monad will transform to [b] by concatenating the lists.

the maybe monad Maybe[a] says if you bind it with a function f: a -> Maybe[b], if Maybe has type Some(a), the data of the monad is replaced by the result of the function. If the monad has type Nothing, then it retains nothing. It's no different to

a = f(a) if a is not None else a

So a monad is just an object that defines the transformation of the underlying data when applying a function that returns a monad of the same type, nothing more.