[dkersten]

We should call things what they are.

Sure - I wasn't seriously suggesting we rename them, just that in my personal experience, newcomers get scared off seemingly by the name alone before ever actually finding anything out about them. A friendlier name may avoid this for newcomers. It definitely wouldn't be worth it for more advanced practitioners where referring to them exactly and in the context of their category theory roots is much more useful than friendliness.

[nbouscal]

I'm not sure how worried I am about the class of newcomers that will be scared off by a word that they don't know. PHP is friendly to newcomers, and the result is thousands of insecure websites built by people who think they know what they're doing but don't. Software engineering is a professional discipline. I don't understand the desire to pander to the lowest common denominator. When's the last time you saw a physics practitioner propose renaming vector spaces to be friendlier to the students?

(For what it's worth, you may not have been serious about renaming monads, but many others have seriously proposed it. In most languages other than Haskell they've been successful.)

[dkersten]

I don't understand the desire to pander to the lowest common denominator.

If people want to learn about monads is up to them and I don't have any skin in the game, but I hear a lot of people complaining that monads are so difficult to understand or use and I guess I was really just observing, in a roundabout way, that I feel a lot of that is down to monads appearing more complicated or scary than they are and that people are put off by it, kind of how people are put off Lisp's due to the parentheses.

[nbouscal]

Yep, on that point I agree with you completely. I don't at all understand why people find their appearance complicated or scary, but I agree that it's more appearance than reality.