On: Ask HN: What programming language should I teach m...

[eru]

Why are Monads considered difficult?

[brl → eru]

They are difficult because the concept is very unfamiliar and abstract. It's also not very easy to see the motivation at first.

[eru → brl]

Perhaps I am too tainted.

Monads can be motivated as a generalization of a lot of stuff that follows similar rules (the Monad laws). E.g. Lists, Haskell's Maybe (representing success/failure), sequential computation.

[brl → eru]

As a Haskell beginner it's not so easy to see the generalization between State, Maybe, IO, and especially Lists.

This is exactly the problem.