Why Monads? – Luca Belli

Monads remain a somewhat mysterious concept in Functional Programming, even though the number of tutorials and blog posts trying to “monadsplain” is at an all-time high. Rather than answering the classical question “What is a Monad?”, we are going to dig more into “Why Monads?”. Building intuition on why monads are useful will help better understand what they are as well. We’ll start with a simple function in a monadless world and we’ll see how annoying it would be to use it in different contexts (List, Maybe, Either). As soon as we are sufficiently frustrated we’ll invoke our friendly Monad and see how much easier our life becomes.

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* About Speaker *

Luca Belli is a Senior Software Engineer at Twitter Cortex, the centralized deep learning hub within the company. Previously he was a Senior Scientist at Conversant Media where he helped bootstrapping image classification using deep learning. His first job was at Wolfram Alpha in Boston. He got his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Tor Vergata University in Rome.

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[mehtubbhai]

After watching so many FP videos, this is the one that finally helped me to understand monads. Clear and concise. Thx Luca!

[berylliosis]

Nice explanation! Granted, I watched this after mostly understanding monads, but it was still the clearest, most practical, most complete explanation I've seen.

[NathanHedglin]

Wow great video. I was halfway to understanding Monads, after far too much research, and this really clarified a lot. Thanks!!!

Extremely clear and concise

[softwareminimalist]

Very clear presentation, I finally understood :)

[brianspinos]

This is the video where I finally understood Monads! Thank you

[byunghunoh]

monad = return + functor + >=
Clear!

[mehtubbhai]

In under 30 mins on top of it all. Other videos go on for twice as long and u still can't make much sense of what monads are. Monads - facilitate function composition.

[aoeu]

Monads are applicatives that can be used as first-class semicolons...