Monads 101

So what are monads? Well, monads are (ignoring Leibniz) a special kind of construction in category theory which are interesting as they can be used to realize in functional languages things like I/O, integration with imperative languages, concurrency and so. For this reason some category theory may help: see Category Theory 101.

• For the beginner:
  • What the hell are monads? is a practicioner introduction to monads, monadic programming, monadic I/O and such. Requires some knowledge of Haskell.
  • All About Monads, a recent extended tutorial which provides some good insight and metaphor that other tutorials have been missing.
  • Check also Monads for the dazed and confused.
• For people willing to know more about that, see Philip Wadler's research papers on monads. Have a look at the paper titled "Understanding monads". [Where is it?? I suspect that the original editor was confused by Comprehending monads, which is about how list comprehensions may be generalised to an arbitrary monad. Mad70]
• For the theoretically challenged see the work of Eugenio Moggi.

This page is linked from: Category Theory 101   Learning Lounge   Monad