Tag Archives: monads

Monads: Easy or Hard?

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Brent

Executive summary: they are actually both (or neither). It is easy to learn their definition but hard to grasp the consequences. Or we might say they are easy to know and hard to understand (grok). It is vitally important for … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, learning, teaching | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

a chicken monad

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Brent

Yesterday, Mark Dominus took a picture of me eating a monad: It was a delicious Chicken monad. data Chicken a = Chicken (Egg a) data Egg a = Egg (Chicken a) instance Monad Chicken where …(exercise for the reader)

Posted in humor, meta | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Fad diets are like burrito tutorials

Posted on January 30, 2009 by Brent

Today at the top of my Gmail inbox was a link with the promise to explain “How I Lost 42 Pounds in 2 Months. Just Obey this 1 Rule, That’s All.” It occurred to me that fad diets are like … Continue reading →

Posted in humor | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Abstraction, intuition, and the “monad tutorial fallacy”

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Brent

While working on an article for the Monad.Reader, I’ve had the opportunity to think about how people learn and gain intuition for abstraction, and the implications for pedagogy. The heart of the matter is that people begin with the concrete, … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, learning, math, teaching | Tagged , , , , , | 131 Comments