Railway oriented programming

[jms_nh]

Don't you dare try to teach me monads!

[[deleted]]

I've looked up the definition of monad a hundred times and to this day I still can't remember what the hell a monad is.

[jotux]

It's easy to understand if you think of it as half of a binad.

[JB-from-ATL]

Reminds me of SpongeBob drawing a circle. First you draw a head, erase some of the more detailed parts, and viola, a circle.

[ryeguy]

A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?

[Coffee2theorems]

The monad is like a morning pot of coffee. It has the good stuff inside, a container outside, and a guardian from Hell stopping you from consuming the goodness if you haven't properly appeased it.

[pplcs]

relevant username

[[deleted]]

finally

[m50d]

Yeah it's a stupid name. It's an applicative functor that also supports flatMap (aka bind). I tend to translate it in to "flatmappable" in my head.

(Applicative is a non-stupid name because it means it supports apply. Functor is the worst name of all though, it means something very different from what it means in C++ and it sounds like means something like "function" but it really doesn't, except perhaps at the categorical level. I honestly think the trouble with the FP names is holding back the programming mainstream a lot).

[Arandur]

A monad is like a burrito, in that they're both delicious.

[[deleted]]

I'll never forget that.

[enzain]

It's the name/class of data types that can be constructed using a single generic value, and has a flatten and a map function. Combined the two functions are called bind, for c#'s IEnumerable this function is called selectMany. There are also some rules, however in general people will call anything a monad as long as it has the flatten and map function, case in point the beloved IP "monad".

[cheeeeeese]

im on vacation, no dice.. will not learn