What is a monad in FP, in categorical terms?

Every time someone promises to "explain monads", my interest is piqued, only to be replaced by frustration when the alleged "explanation" is a long list of examples terminated by some off-hand remark that the "mathematical theory" behind the "esoteric ideas" is "too complicated to explain at this point".

Now I'm asking for the opposite. I have a solid grasp on category theory and I'm not afraid of diagram chasing, Yoneda's lemma or derived functors (and indeed on monads and adjunctions in the categorical sense).

Could someone give me a clear and concise definition of what a monad is in functional programming? The fewer examples the better: sometimes one clear concept says more than a hundred timid examples. Haskell would do nicely as a language for demonstration though I'm not picky.

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A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, whats the problem?.

Humor aside, I personally believe that monads, as they are used in Haskell and functional programming, are better understood from the monads-as-an-interface point of view (as in Carl's and Dan's answers) instead of from the monads-as-the-term-from-category-theory point of view. I have to confess that I only really internalized the whole monad thing when I had to use a monadic library from another language in a real project.

You mention that you didn't like all the "lots of examples" tutorials. Has anyone ever pointed you to the Awkward squad paper? It focuses manly in the IO monad but the introduction gives a good technical and historical explanation of why the monad concept was embraced by Haskell in the first place.

answered 2011-11-22T14:12:05.240

What is a monad in FP, in categorical terms?

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