alt Hacker NewsPeople think category theory is weird and confusing, but really it just managed to name things (classes) that before were just "things". One might not know what monad or functor is, but they surely used it and have intuition on how it works.
People think category theory is weird and confusing, but really it just managed to name things (classes) that before were just "things". One might not know what monad or functor is, but they surely used it and have intuition on how it works.
Right. I don't know how many times I've been exasperated by how monads are perceived as difficult.
Do you understand "flatmap"? Good, that's literally all a monad is: a flatmappable.
Technically it's also an applicative functor, but at the end of the day, that gives us a few trivial things:
- a constructor (i.e., a way to put something inside your monad, exactly how `[1]` constructs a list out of a natural number)
- map (everyone understands this bc we use them with lists constantly)
- ap, which is basically just "map for things with more than one parameter"
Monads are easy. But when you tell someone "well it's a box and you can unwrap it and modify things with a function that also returns a box, and you unwrap that box take the thing out and put it inside the original box—
No. It is a flatmappable. That's it. Can you flatmap a list? Good. Then you already can use the entirety of monad-specific properties.
When you start talking about Maybe, Either, etc. then you've moved from explaining monads to explaining something else.
It's like saying "classes are easy" and then someone says "yeah well what about InterfaceOrienterMethodContainerArrangeableFilterableClass::filter" that's not a class! That's one method in a specific class. Not knowing it doesn't mean you don't understand classes. It just means you don't have the standard library memorized!