On Wednesday, 11 December 2013 at 05:14:56 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
On 12/10/2013 3:53 PM, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
BTW, the other day I friend tried to explain me monads
and he realized couldn't understand them himself
The best way to learn something is to try to explain it to
someone else.
Some things are very hard to explain because explaining them
requires a lot of context unknown to the recipient, and there is
no appropriate analogy to pass that context "by reference". So
it's often wiser to give up and let the other person acquire the
context on his own. Explaining monads to other people is a waste
of time :).
There is an interesting write-up by Dijkstra, which touches this
subject as well http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF.
