It's 2017. Can anyone explain what a monad is?

(le)monad(e)

>>58502588
nice reddit post, you fucking faggot.

>>58502575
In what terms? Mostly people are just interested in it because they can create a pattern that simulates state in pure functional languages.

People don't really care about it's pure mathematical definition, I find. It's more a "WTF is this thing in haskell" issue.

>>58502638
Can you explain simply how it simulates states while remaining pure?

>>58502803

The state is represented by the datatype, not the function. A function can take a state structure and return a different one without any of its variables changing values.

Functions in pure mathematics don't have modifiable variables. That being the case, if you wanted to model a computer as a set of pure mathematical functions, you'd make a datatype to represent the state of the machine, and a function representing each of the machine's instructions..

>>58502575
Leibniz