I wrote: > For my part, I'm going to go read the [Monad (functional programming)] > Wikipedia article
Well, the lede of that article was excruciatingly unhelpful, and now I remember why I disregarded it before. But googling around, I found the perfectly-titled paper: What the hell are Monads? http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~antoy/Courses/TPFLP/lectures/MONADS/Noel/research/monads.html Which so far seems helpful (lots of other papers on the topic assume you kinda-know what a monad is, whereas this one assumes you know zip about them; unfortunately, it still assumes are coming from the Haskell world). > I think the best kind of simplicity is well-packaged complexity. And from the glimmerings I have so far, I like these things. As programmers, we're in the business of abstraction. Our industry is generalization. And monads do seem to package up complexity nicely. Still not sure how the concept would fit into the J world (I get the sense that a lot of the uses and values of monads are already baked into the design of J, in different ways, rather than through a more general monadic worldview). But I'm hopeful. -Dan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
