Indeed my tutorial, http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/The_Monadic_Way/Part_I, pretends to be a “translation” of Philip Wadler’s “Monads for functional programming”. I’m not saying it is a useful or good translation, but tries to make clear that Wadler’s paper IS the paper to read if you want to understand monads. I was first in stating that. You come second.

Andrea

Looking through it now, it does seem pretty good. I think I still prefer the paper, because it is extremely thorough, and I think the pace works better in the paper, as the sigfpe one is a little quick. I do wish I’d actually bothered to read this the first time :-p

That said, I wonder what you made of the sigfpe tutorial. It seems to avoid the sins of bullshittery and strikes a delicate balance between showing you that they are easy and not trying to pass them off as trivial.

For a bit of background, maybe to share the plight of a monad-tutorial-writer, I mostly wrote that tutorial to teach myself about monads. At the time, I knew only about ‘All about Monads’ and the YAHT tutorial, which I found myself struggling with. So I took stock of what I think I got, and then tried explaining it in my terms, simple “mechanical” and “moving-parts”-ish. Some people have found it helpful — writing it at least made me feel comfortable enough to use them with some success — but I’m always worrying that I’ve let somebody walk away with the wrong idea, that I’ve deceived them (and myself) into think they understood monads when in fact I’ve just made us all miss the point completely. Somebody remarked that, “yeah, it’s just a like a FP design pattern”… which I’m not sure I would be comfortable with.

[*] the latter metaphor was proposed by a wikibookian who found the imagery of the first one ‘far fetched’ (a space suit for more than one person?). Unfortunately, the new metaphore gets things ‘backwards’ in the sense that the thing that is inside the container is the ‘dangerous’ stuff, nuclear waste, oh my! But I suppose this illustrates the danger of trying to explain something like this with a metaphor.