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Comment by dllthomas | Hacker News Reader

'"Monoid" has no good real-world parallel. It has no related or relevant meaning outside of very, very specific contexts. That's what makes it "detached". It's off on its own, with an isolated and non-obvious meaning.'

Also, this objection would seem to apply equally well to functions and variables as monoids.

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I wouldn't say so. "Function" is a pretty common term used to refer to somebody doing some specific task. There's an obvious correlation between an employee tasked with a carrying out a specific role or action, and a chunk of source code that does something specific.

And the same holds true for "variable". It's a very common term for things that change their state of being, including stuff that isn't directly related to programming or mathematics. Stuff like the weather, somebody's mood, and so on.

"Monoid" just doesn't have any everyday meaning like those terms do, especially a meaning that so closely resembles the programming concept like in the case of "function" and "variable".

The everyday meanings of these words are misleading when applied to the context of a particular programming language. Variables in one language are not at all related to variables in another. Mathematical variables, for example, do not change at all. Similar differences exist for functions and objects. These highly-overloaded terms are a constant source of confusion for people trying to learn different programming languages.

Monoid, on the other hand, has no such problem. If you look it up, its meaning in mathematics directly translates to its meaning in Haskell.

"These highly-overloaded terms are a constant source of confusion for people trying to learn different programming languages."

Yeah, they mean yet something else in statistical software.

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