Hacker News Reader

Comment by nbouscal | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand why people think monad is a "fancy scary term". It's a five-letter easily-pronounceable word. What makes it fancy or scary? I think people assume that they're scary, and then confirmation bias themselves into making them hard to learn, despite them being a reasonably simple concept overall.

As for calling them strategies… if we called them that it would make learning and understanding the intermediate and advanced concepts significantly less accessible and more difficult. We should call things what they are.

View on HN

hmm, if we called them what they are we'd call them "type wrapper functions" and talk about "type wrapper function chains", monads carries zero metaphorical/associative meaning. I think thats the problem with the name and a large reason people find them so unapproachable, most other terms in computer science carry significant associative meaning that helps in learning them, pointers have to do with pointing at things, functions carry the mathematical meaning of a set of inputs mapping to a set of outputs, etc.

You're demonstrating that you don't know what monads are. "Type wrapper function" could mean any number of things (lack of specificity is a bad trait in naming), but it couldn't mean a monad: monads consist of three things, whereas "type wrapper function" implies one thing.

Names don't need to be metaphorical. The purpose of a name is not to teach you what the thing is. For that, you should have a proper explanation from someone who knows. Names have a different, very important purpose: uniquely specifying the thing being named. "Monad" does that very effectively.

> I really don't understand why people think monad is a "fancy scary term".

The reason could be that the term "monad" comes from category theory, and that is a topic not everybody is too familiar with...

Lack of familiarity doesn't make it fancy, and for a software engineer it shouldn't make it scary either. One of the largest parts of our job is learning unfamiliar things.

We should call things what they are.

Sure - I wasn't seriously suggesting we rename them, just that in my personal experience, newcomers get scared off seemingly by the name alone before ever actually finding anything out about them. A friendlier name may avoid this for newcomers. It definitely wouldn't be worth it for more advanced practitioners where referring to them exactly and in the context of their category theory roots is much more useful than friendliness.

I'm not sure how worried I am about the class of newcomers that will be scared off by a word that they don't know. PHP is friendly to newcomers, and the result is thousands of insecure websites built by people who think they know what they're doing but don't. Software engineering is a professional discipline. I don't understand the desire to pander to the lowest common denominator. When's the last time you saw a physics practitioner propose renaming vector spaces to be friendlier to the students?

(For what it's worth, you may not have been serious about renaming monads, but many others have seriously proposed it. In most languages other than Haskell they've been successful.)

I don't understand the desire to pander to the lowest common denominator.

If people want to learn about monads is up to them and I don't have any skin in the game, but I hear a lot of people complaining that monads are so difficult to understand or use and I guess I was really just observing, in a roundabout way, that I feel a lot of that is down to monads appearing more complicated or scary than they are and that people are put off by it, kind of how people are put off Lisp's due to the parentheses.

Yep, on that point I agree with you completely. I don't at all understand why people find their appearance complicated or scary, but I agree that it's more appearance than reality.

> What makes it fancy or scary?

Its an abstraction and abstractions are hard. In away, its similar to why beginners tend to have trouble with recursion (if you try to understand a recursive program by stepping through without using abstractions like preconditions and postconditions)

Why would calling them anything different have any effect on learning other concepts?

Because the associated concepts, for example Kleisli categories, are easy to find if your search is seeded with the word "monad", but very hard to find if it's seeded with the word "strategy".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com