Hobby-hacking Eric

2007-08-16

a history of monad tutorials

Here's a historical overview of monad tutorials since Phil Wadler's original observation that monads can be implemented in Haskell and become extremely useful.

When I wrote this, I originally wanted to do a real history, with an analysis of how people have tried to teach monads over the years, but I guess this is about all I have time for. Dates, authors and blurbs. Corrections/additions always welcome! As you can tell, I have not read them all.

Edit 2007-08-17: I have updated and moved this timeline to Haskellwiki. This might be useful when some future Haskell archeologist tries to figure out the precise "ah-ha!" moment when every single programmer in the world 'got' monads.


8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Monads in Perl

Anonymous said...

Did you miss this one?
http://www.engr.mun.ca/~theo/Misc/haskell_and_monads.htm

kowey said...

Keep them coming, folks! I might not update the page for a while because I want to avoid bothering people's RSS aggregrators. In fact, maybe it's worthwhile to move this page to Haskellwiki...

Anonymous said...

Another very pragmatic tutorial:


Monad Transformers Step by Step

nfxsucks said...

Also http://www.patryshev.com/monad/m-intro.html

kowey said...

Just jotting down my notes from Wayback Machine (thanks andrey)

http://web.archive.org/web/20070114063829/http://www.patryshev.com/monad/m-intro.html

2006-07 Crash Monad Tutorial Vlad Patryshev
"This crash course starts with an easy introduction to categories and functors, then we define a monad..."

newsham said...

incomplete but working entry level tutorial:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction_to_Haskell_IO/Actions

kowey said...

Thanks! I don't think it really counts, but if you feel it does, feel free to chase down the history and update the wiki :-)