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Comment by rustyzig | Hacker News Reader

As you point out, monads come from category theory, not native to computer science. Thus there had to be someone to introduce approaches to applying monads in computer science. The paper usually credited with that is: https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/b... Which the parent rightfully points out was written by the same person primarily responsible for the design of generics in Go: https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/go.html

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> As you point out, monads come from category theory, not native to computer science. Thus there had to be someone to introduce approaches to applying monads in computer science.

With full respect given to Wadler and his contributions to computer science, the very paper you cite authored by Wadler declares:

  The concept of a monad, which arises from category theory, 
  has been applied by Moggi to structure the denotational 
  semantics of programming languages.

Therefore, one cannot assert that a computer scientist whom identifies a predecessor's contributions such as above is, in fact, responsible for said contributions.

And with full respect also given to Moggi, introductions are only introductions if they are heard.

If we were talking about the first person to discover monads, Wadler clearly would not be he. Wadler was but a wee toddler barely sputtering out his first words when the term "monad" was coined. As we are talking about who introduced monads to computer science, the signs I see continue to point to Wadler. His work is, by all appearances, what caught the attention of the computer science community. "Monads for functional programming" is regularly cited as the seminal paper. They are strongly associated with Haskell. It would even appear from the previous comment that you only came to learn about Moggi because of Wadler making his introduction, which echos Moggi not being particularly influential socially.

If you have evidence to suggest that Moggi played a bigger role in introducing (not inventing) the concepts, I am definitely keen to learn about it.

> If we were talking about the first person to discover monads, Wadler clearly would not be he.

We are not. Remember what the OP stated, to which I originally replied:

  Funnily enough, Go's generics were designed by the same guy 
  who introduced monads to computer science.

This is demonstrably incorrect, as Wadler did not "introduce monads to computer science" and is what I disagreed with alone.

Did Wadler take monads to new and important levels in both computer science and software engineering? Absolutely!

> It would even appear from the previous comment that you only came to learn about Moggi because of Wadler making his introduction, which echos Moggi not being particularly influential socially.

I quoted the Moggi attribution due to it being present in the paper you kindly provided. Whether Moggi has any influence socially is irrelevant as it pertains to the original thesis discussed above.

> If you have evidence to suggest that Moggi played a bigger role in introducing (not inventing) the concepts, I am definitely keen to learn about it.

Again, this is not germane to the aforementioned OP statement.

Moggi's social influence is everything as introductions can only happen in the social realm. It continues that all evidence I can find suggests that his work went unnoticed until Wadler pushed it into view. In other words, people came to learn about his work only because of Wadler making the introduction. Nobody, except where one may find it trying to be implied in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48304692, has suggested Wadler invented monads. The OP clearly wrote "introduced", not "invented".

On that note, calculus come from physics. AI should really hand back all those jacobians and hessians.

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