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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

First, thanks for all involved in getting this posted!

I'm somewhat curious on why the industry has such an aversion to simulating things in our mind. Especially when this seems to be one of the arguments employed against monads in this speech. That it basically couches something known in an odd name that is not known. Isn't this just stating that it is bad because it confuses the simulator that is the reader?

That said, the live coding aspect is something that I am just now learning from lisp with emacs. Being able to evaluate a function inline is rather nice. It is somewhat sad, as I still wish I could get a better vote in for literate programming. (Betraying my appeal to the human factor moreso than the mechanical one.)

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Monads have nothing to do with simulating anything. They are just a commonly recurring pattern of computational contexts (more precisely, functors) that also provide two basic operations:

1. entering the context (pure :: a -> m a) 2. collapsing nested contexts into one (join :: m (m a) -> m a)

Together with some coherence laws that ensure that these operations do exactly, no more or less, than entering the context and collapsing nested instances of it.

Did you watch the video? I'm not referring to monads simulating something. I'm referring to the observation that when reading code you are simulating its execution. My understanding of the video's complaint against monads is that the signature of monads is actually quite simple and well understood in different contexts by different names.

The video goes on to display an environment where you do not have to simulate the code in your head.

This progression seems somewhat interesting to me. As does the desire to not have to simulate code in your head.

>This progression seems somewhat interesting to me. As does the desire to not have to simulate code in your head.

But none of that has anything to do with monads.

Ok... I think I'm getting trolled at this point.

I am taking issue with the video's critique of monads. Wherein it is claimed that monads manage to take a common and understandable behavior and make it laughably impossible to explain to people by giving it a weird name. Essentially, the problem with monads is one of it being difficult to "simulate" under the name "monad" for many individuals.

This part, I actually feel makes sense and resonates well. Simply follow the progression in the video and see how "FlatMappable" becomes less and less intuitive as it is given worse and worse names.

The part that is interesting to me, is how this then progresses into a point on how programmers should not have to simulate the code in their head. Now, I realize there is a big difference between "should not have to" and "is difficult to intuitively do so". Still seems an odd progression, though.

>Ok... I think I'm getting trolled at this point.

If you don't want to discuss something, then don't post. You are not making any sense, and calling people trolls does not help at all.

I should have put a smiley on that, then. While feeling trolled, I highly suspect this is just a rather amusing case of poor communication.

At no point was I trying to describe or discuss monads. That is something a response to me thought I was trying to do. When referring to "simulating" a system, I was referring to where the video refers to the process of reading "dead code" in a text editor. There is a large rant on monads in the video where the argument appears to be that the problem is strictly with the name. The reason given that it takes something understood, and hides it behind non-obvious names. I extrapolated this to be that it makes the program and the idea "hard to simulate" for the coder reading the code.

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