On 20th March 2018 the Typelevel Summit took place at Broad Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts where Luca Belli spoke about the intuition behind monads.
Why Monads?
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.
About Luca Belli 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.