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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

> I'm fifteen years old with good knowledge of mostly high school level math, and may have missed some parts.

Kabir,

Great work on getting this done. I wonder if looking around for and mentioning the similar "You Could Have Invented Monads"[0] would be a good move

[0] http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad...

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I know "20y of professional practice in the industry expert"s who would look at you with a blank stare for such mastery of non-trivial abstractions, and yet not get it.

Good job is what I mean

I sometimes wonder if the "old" are just so set in their ways that they (unconsciously) don't want to learn anything new. Will has great power.

I don't know, but I have noticed two trends: for people who have worked x years, some have x years of experience, some have x times the same year.

Thanks haha, I had exposure to computers from a very early age, and I try to make functions/systems representing things I'm curious about. It's helped me grasp ideas and come up with new ones, and I should probably write about them more :P

As one of these guys (not yet 20 years experience but close), I concur. I don't accept defeat though as I'm actually trying to learn FP for the third time! I bookmarked this blog post for when I get to monads again.

Actually I'm fine with "lightweight" FP like Scheme or Elixir (HOFs, recursion, immutable data, etc.) but still struggle with "real" FP like Haskell or functional Scala (algebraic data types, monads, lenses, etc.)

By the way I couldn't help to notice that the blog also features a CSS centering article. The author really is into esoteric concepts!

Humility and self awareness is always inspiring. As well as starting to learn new concepts 20y in. Kudos!

for a good explanation what ADTs are useful for watch Effective ML by Yaron Minsky from 18:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J8YyfrSwTk

Thank you! I'll mention "You Could Have Invented Monads" along with a couple of other great resources that helped me at the end of the post.

Great article and it started to grok for me by the end. Although that happens every time I read an article on Monads... getting it to stick in my head is the problem.

I think I need a UnderstandInTheFuture Monad in my head that maintains the state of my understanding. :D

They say the best teacher is a recent novice.

That’s interesting—I’ve noticed my ability to explain programming concepts to newcomers seems to have degraded.

I think you can maintain it by continually teaching, but in my case I had a gap of 5 years or so, and trying again afterward I feel less of an understanding of the mind of a newcomer, which is instrumental in teaching...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge has some good sources on studies done on this concept.

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