Intro
I've split the introduction to this post into two parts. The first part is long and sentimental, describing my personal journey with monads up to now. The second part is short and to the point. Feel free to skip over the next section if you're not interested in the sappy stuff - you won't be missing anything important.Sappy Intro
I've been programming Scala for a little over two years now, and I love it. I was an old-time Java hack, firmly embedded in the OO programming paradigm. Scala to me was largely like a souped up Java, with all the clunky, broken things about Java fixed (aside from type erasure). I had taken courses Scheme and the lambda calculus in college, and I thought I had a pretty good understanding of functional programming. However, while programming Scala, and getting exposure to the language, libraries, and community, I began to discover that there is a lot more to functional programming than I originally thought. By far the most prominent example of this was the the importance of the concept of the monad in the Scala community.I didn't know what a monad was, and over the past couple of years, I've made various efforts to try to understand it. For the most part, the videos I watched, and the articles I read, left me with one of two impressions: Either it didn't make any sense, or I just couldn't see what the big deal was. As I continued to explore, I began to notice that most of the explanatory examples are in Haskell, and not understanding the Haskell language or syntax was a serious impediment for me. At that point, I set out specifically searching for monad examples in Scala, and found this excellent series of blog posts by James Iry: Monads are Elephants (see also parts two, three, and four). Finally, monads were beginning to make sense! But after reading these articles, I realized I was going to have to implement some monads myself to really grok them. I also knew that I would have to follow by example to do this. Which meant that I really needed to bite the bullet and look at some monad examples in Haskell.
