Monads as monoids in the category of endofunctors are passé. They’re Banksy. They’re mid-2000’s The Killers. Interesting and exciting when we first discovered them, now trite and only to be enjoyed ironically. Applicative as monoids in the category of endofunctors though. These are Flying Lotus. They are Finnegan’s Wake. They are the Fluxus movement. They are all things you say …
read more »(N.B, the following are understandings resulting from reading the wonderful paper ‘Notions of Computation as Monoids’, the following Haskell extensions are needed: GADTs, TypeOperators, DerivingFunctor) If you’ve ever witnessed someone ask what a monad is, you’ve undoubtedly watched them be hit with a pithy, unoriginal “a monad is the monoid in the category of endofunctors” by some smart arse. The …
read more »To the delight of functional programmers and the umbrage of everyone else, Monads have crept their way into Real World™ programming. Being a perspicacious programmer you’ve noticed that from Promises in JavaScript ES6 to the Maybe-esque null-coalescing operator introduced in C# 6, the once feared M-word is not only extant but here to stay. So, having ham-fisted a monad or …