Anybody who tries to popularize Haskell has to deal with the monad problem. You can’t write the simplest Haskell program without a monad (the IO monad in particular) and yet there is no easy way to explain what a monad is. Mind you, when teaching object oriented programming, nobody starts with a definition of “object.” There’s no need for that because everybody has some intuition about objects — we are surrounded by objects in real life. Which is very convenient because if you tried to define what an object is in C++ or Java, you’d have to use quite a bit of hard-core PL theory; plus you’d have to wave your hands a lot. This trick doesn’t work with monads because, except for category theorists, nobody comes to Haskell with any intuitions about monads. The name monad is scary in itself (this is probably why monads in F# are innocuously called “computation expressions”).

In my n’th attempt to tackle monads I tried a different, mystical, approach. In mysticism you often talk about things that you cannot define. Taoism takes this approach to the extreme — any attempt to define Tao must fail: “Tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao.” Hence the slightly tongue-in-cheek approach I took in this tutorial, Pure Functions, Laziness, I/O, and Monads. If you’re new to Haskell, it might help if you read the two previous tutorials in my Basics of Haskell. Notice that these tutorials are in the new format introduced by the School of Haskell, where you can run and edit program snippets directly in your browser.

I must confess that this tutorial got slightly cold welcome in the Haskell community. That’s why I’m curious what non-Haskellers think of it. Does my approach make monads less or more scary? Take into account that I decided to tackle monads right after explaining the very basics of Haskell syntax — in most courses or books monads are treated as an advanced topic.