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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Once you understand monads, you lose the ability to explain monads. Hence the number of monads tutorials grows at an exponential rate as every new understander tries to explain them and fails.

it's a fun problem in teaching

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> Once you understand... you lose the ability to explain

Sorry, this does not make sense to me.

Douglas Crockford on Monads:

In addition to its being good and useful, it’s also cursed and the curse of the monad is that once you get the epiphany, once you understand - "oh that's what it is" - you lose the ability to explain it to anybody else.

https://youtu.be/dkZFtimgAcM

Here is a link that helps me think about it: https://www.alanwatts.org/3-3-10-gateless-gate/ (I teach Math and a common complaint, against all math teachers, is "They obviously know the material but they cannot teach it." When I first heard AW talk about this it was a relevation for me because it so closely linked with my experience. You say to people "A vector space is a place for linear combinations to happen" and they don't get it, of course they don't get it, I wouldn't have gotten it, but that's what a vector space is. So you have to do lots of examples, and work around the edges, and somehow sit with it for a while. Anyway, I find that for me this link conveys the point of that quote about monads.)

Ironically, I think the original paper that introduced Monads as a useful computational abstraction is the clearest explanation I've seen.

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/b...

Corollary: a good teacher hasn’t understood anything. Well, that’s wrong, I think.

However, this might be true: A good teacher remembers not having understood it.

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