Strange Loop

Monad examples for normal people, in Python and Clojure

"A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?" That's a quip from James Iry, and he's right - it's unfortunate that most monad tutorials talk about the implementation of monads, instead of showing us how to use library-provided monads to make our business code better. Monads are a really awesome design pattern for abstracting repetitive plumbing from large business applications. This talk will introduce by example common patterns of repetition and plumbing in large codebases, how monads and monad transformers help abstract this plumbing. We will hand-wave over the implementation of most monads because they can be provided by a library anyway, and focus on code examples that use monads, in Python and Clojure side by side.

Dustin Getz

enterprise cloud computing. functional programming enthusiast. writes code 7 days a week.