[rmcclellan]

I completely agree. It's hard for beginners to learn that a monad isn't a thing, it's an property that can apply to many different things. A monad is so general it's hard to have a single intuition about it.

I think perhaps another reason why beginners find monads so hard to understand, especially those coming from a math background, is that >>= is a bizarre presentation of monads. I think, for example, defining a monad as an applicative with a join operation would have been a much better idea - most monads, like Maybe or [], make the most sense to me as "containers" that can be joined. The bind operator never really made intuitive sense to me when thinking about a monad as a container with a structure. Plus, to me, m (m a) -> m a is a lot easier to recognize than m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b.

This is especially true since applicatives are now becoming a very popular language idiom. It seems unfair to beginners to make them try to understand applicatives and then make them learn an unrelated typeclass for monads, when mathematically the two are very similar objects.