What in the frick is a monad?
@flesh A miserable little pile of types. 🍷
@flesh In a bit less jest, I like to think of it as a bit of a smart black box. You can tell it what to do and it'll do it if the type inside it is right.
@arina_artemis That sounds like...a function.
@flesh Okay, not what I was aiming for. 😅
First of all, a monad is data. More concretely, it's a generic data type, usually wrapping two types.
And then you can give a monad a function and it'll call the function (and give you a new monad) if the data it's currently wrapping is of correct type.
@flesh Like the most popular modal is Maybe (sometimes called Option). It can hold either a thing or nothing. If you give it a function and it holds nothing, it'll do nothing. If you give it a function and it holds a thing, it'll apply the function to the thing and give you a new monad with the result.
@arina_artemis Ah, yes, thank you.