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by AdieuToLogic
22 days ago
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> As you point out, monads come from category theory, not native to computer science. Thus there had to be someone to introduce approaches to applying monads in computer science. With full respect given to Wadler and his contributions to computer science, the very paper you cite authored by Wadler declares: The concept of a monad, which arises from category theory,
has been applied by Moggi to structure the denotational
semantics of programming languages.
Therefore, one cannot assert that a computer scientist whom identifies a predecessor's contributions such as above is, in fact, responsible for said contributions. |
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If we were talking about the first person to discover monads, Wadler clearly would not be he. Wadler was but a wee toddler barely sputtering out his first words when the term "monad" was coined. As we are talking about who introduced monads to computer science, the signs I see continue to point to Wadler. His work is, by all appearances, what caught the attention of the computer science community. "Monads for functional programming" is regularly cited as the seminal paper. They are strongly associated with Haskell. It would even appear from the previous comment that you only came to learn about Moggi because of Wadler making his introduction, which echos Moggi not being particularly influential socially.
If you have evidence to suggest that Moggi played a bigger role in introducing (not inventing) the concepts, I am definitely keen to learn about it.