> what is an example of a monad
"One example of a monad is the Maybe monad, which is often used to represent computations that may or may not have a result. The Maybe monad allows you to define computations that may or may not return a value, and provides methods for handling the absence of a value in a predictable and composable way. For example, you might use the Maybe monad to represent a computation that retrieves a user's profile from a database. If the user exists, the computation will return the user's profile; if the user does not exist, the computation will return nothing. The Maybe monad provides methods for handling both cases in a clean and declarative manner, without having to resort to explicit checks for null values or other error-prone techniques."
> what is an example of the maybe monad
...< some example code >
"In this example, the getUserProfile function uses the Maybe.fromValue method to wrap the user object that is returned from the database lookup in a Maybe monad. This allows us to chain methods such as map and orElse on the result of the getUserProfile function, without having to worry about null or undefined values. If the user exists, the computation will return the user's name in all uppercase letters. If the user does not exist, the orElse method will return the default value 'USER NOT FOUND' instead."
In this view, it's a function that returns a known but abstracted symbol of some underlying state. It sounds like the function true() is a monad in the sense that it returns or doesnt, but instead of TRUE, a generic monad could be something like isElephant, notHotdog, isSandwich, where the state represented by the monad can become an attribute (or a condition) of some other entity, depending on the order in which you evaluate the relationship between the monad and what it is an abstraction for.
I have either just won the "explain monads" quest, or failed quite publicly at it while writing something persuasive but misleading, but if I were to create an abstract state like isSandwich, could I be using a monad?