The fallacy is believing that a complete fantasy metaphor like burritos is as useful as a concrete example like "the [] type forms a monad with concatMap and singleton".
The latter actually tells you something. You can start from there, add a few more concrete examples, and start to understand what exactly monads abstract over.
The former is... Nothing. Nothing at all. It communicates exactly nothing. Or rather, it communicates so many hundreds or thousands of different potential metaphors that it doesn't serve to transfer meaning between two people.
And that's the point of the article. Monads are abstract at a level foreign to most programmers. When they first start to put the pieces together, they might enlist the aid of a metaphor, but the way they do so requires a lot of internal context. To others without all that context, the metaphor is useless.
It's easy to mistake metaphor for the understanding you've slowly built up. This article is a reminder that the understanding is the important part, not the metaphor.
The latter actually tells you something. You can start from there, add a few more concrete examples, and start to understand what exactly monads abstract over.
The former is... Nothing. Nothing at all. It communicates exactly nothing. Or rather, it communicates so many hundreds or thousands of different potential metaphors that it doesn't serve to transfer meaning between two people.
And that's the point of the article. Monads are abstract at a level foreign to most programmers. When they first start to put the pieces together, they might enlist the aid of a metaphor, but the way they do so requires a lot of internal context. To others without all that context, the metaphor is useless.
It's easy to mistake metaphor for the understanding you've slowly built up. This article is a reminder that the understanding is the important part, not the metaphor.