It’s a container with certain behaviors and guarantees making them easy and reliable to manipulate and compose. A practical example is a generic List, that behaves like:
List[1, 2, 3], i.e. (“new”, “unit”, “wrap”) to create, containing obj(s)
map(func) to transform objs inside, List[A] -> List[B]
first(), i.e. (“unwrap”, “value”) to get back the obj
flat_map(func), i.e. (“bind”) to un-nest one level when func(a) itself produces another List, e.g. [3, 4].flat_map(get_divisors) == flatten_once([[1, 3], [1, 2, 4]]) == [1, 3, 1, 2, 4]
Consider the code to do these things using for loops – the “business logic” func() would be embedded and interlaced with flow control.
The same is true of Maybe, a monad to represent something or nothing, i.e. a “list” of at most one, i.e. a way to avoid “null”.
Consider how quickly things get messy when there are multiple functions and multiple edge cases like empty lists or "null"s to deal with. In those cases, monads like List and Maybe really help clean things up.
IMO the composability really can’t be understated. “Composing” ten for loops via interlacing and if checks and nesting sounds like a nightmare, whereas a few LazyList and Maybe monads will be much cleaner.
Also, the distinction monads make with what’s “inside” and what’s “outside” make it useful to represent and compartmentalize scope and lifetimes, which makes it useful for monads like IO and Async.
It’s a container with certain behaviors and guarantees making them easy and reliable to manipulate and compose. A practical example is a generic List, that behaves like:
List[1, 2, 3], i.e. (“new”, “unit”, “wrap”) to create, containing obj(s)map(func)to transform objs inside, List[A] -> List[B]first(), i.e. (“unwrap”, “value”) to get back the objflat_map(func), i.e. (“bind”) to un-nest one level whenfunc(a)itself produces another List, e.g.[3, 4].flat_map(get_divisors) == flatten_once([[1, 3], [1, 2, 4]]) == [1, 3, 1, 2, 4]Consider the code to do these things using
forloops – the “business logic”func()would be embedded and interlaced with flow control.The same is true of Maybe, a monad to represent something or nothing, i.e. a “list” of at most one, i.e. a way to avoid “null”.
Consider how quickly things get messy when there are multiple functions and multiple edge cases like empty lists or "null"s to deal with. In those cases, monads like List and Maybe really help clean things up.
IMO the composability really can’t be understated. “Composing” ten
forloops via interlacing andifchecks and nesting sounds like a nightmare, whereas a few LazyList and Maybe monads will be much cleaner.Also, the distinction monads make with what’s “inside” and what’s “outside” make it useful to represent and compartmentalize scope and lifetimes, which makes it useful for monads like IO and Async.