[AnimalMuppet]

This may be a dissenting opinion, but... Haskell tried to avoid mutable state. "Local state manipulation" was not really a thing you could do in Haskell, deliberately. Then someone figured out that you could (ab)use a monad to do that. And because that was the only way, whenever they needed to manipulate state, Haskell programmers reached for a monad.

So it's not "what can a Haskell monad do that a Python class cannot". It's "what can a Python class do in a straightforward way that Haskell has to use a monad for, because Haskell put the programmer in a straightjacket where they couldn't do it without a monad". It's basically a pattern to get around the limitations of a language (at least when it's used for state).

[tome]

This is not historically how Haskell was developed. Haskell didn't try to "avoid mutable state". Haskell tried to be (and indeed succeeded in being) referentially transparent. Now, it turns out that you can't uphold referential transparency whilst having access to mutable state in the "traditional" way, but you can access mutable state if you introduce monads as a means of structuring your computation.

So, they're certainly not a means of getting around a limitation of the language. If it was just a limitation that limitation would have been lifted a long time ago! It's a means of preserving a desirable property of the language (referential transparency) whilst also preserving access to mutable state, exceptions, I/O, and all sorts of other things one expects in a normal language.

See my comment here for a little bit more about the benefits of referential transparency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44448127

[AnimalMuppet]

But historically, wasn't there a fair period of time between Haskell insisting on referential transparency (and therefore not allowing traditional mutable state) and monads being introduced as a way to deal with it? That was my understanding of the history.

And if so, then it seems fair to say at least that monads were a way to get around the limitations imposed by a desirable feature of the language...

[tome]

> But historically, wasn't there a fair period of time between Haskell insisting on referential transparency (and therefore not allowing traditional mutable state) and monads being introduced as a way to deal with it? That was my understanding of the history.

Yes, although there were solutions in the meantime. I/O was performed in the original version of Haskell through input-output streams and continuation passing style. It turns out that both approaches could have been given monad interfaces if "monad" as an abstraction had been understood at the time, but it wasn't, so they had ad hoc interfaces instead.

> And if so, then it seems fair to say at least that monads were a way to get around the limitations imposed by a desirable feature of the language...

I mean, sort of, but that seems more of a judgement than a fact. Would you say that function calls in C were a way to "get around the limitations imposed by not allowing global jumps"?

In both cases I'd just say they're a useful abstraction that lets you achieve a well-specified goal whilst preserving some desirable language property.

[Dylan16807]

> Would you say that function calls in C were a way to "get around the limitations imposed by not allowing global jumps"?

If C had started with a rule against global jumps, and only figured out function calls later, then yes I would say that.