Composing Software

Monads

“Once you understand monads, you immediately become incapable of explaining them to anyone else” Lady Monadgreen’s curse ~ Gilad Bracha (used famously by Douglas Crockford)

“Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle

Before you begin to learn this, you should already know:

• Function composition: compose(f, g) = f(g(x))
• Functor basics: An understanding of the Array.prototype.map() operation.

If you go searching the internet for “monad” you’re going to get bombarded by impenetrable category theory math and a bunch of people “helpfully” explaining monads in terms of burritos and space suits.

Monads are simple. The language ...