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Comment by username223 | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't call monads "hard to grasp" so much as "hard to explain" or "easy to obfuscate." That's what the "mumble mumble endofunctors" joke is getting at: sometimes they're a useful generalization, but more often they're a way to make easy things sound hard, or to make bad teachers sound smart.

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I agree that they often make things seem harder then they really are. The monad tutorial that works best for me is the "don't mention monads" tutorial. Thats the one where you just show some specific task to complete, like composing (a -> Maybe b) functions, and show that there is a neat operator that does it. Then, at some future time, show another composition task, like composing (a -> [b]) functions, and show the same operator again.

Starting with the abstract just messes people up and gets them confused. You don't start throwing around Kleisli Arrows and endofunctors right off the bat.

>"hard to explain" or "easy to obfuscate."

I wouldn't call it either of those things. They are so general that people have a hard time getting them. That's all.

>That's what the "mumble mumble endofunctors" joke is getting at: sometimes they're a useful generalization, but more often they're a way to make easy things sound hard, or to make bad teachers sound smart.

That is not at all what the joke is getting at (and that doesn't even make sense).

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