Slowly understanding monads

Since I am still in the process of learning Scala and the new functional concepts it brings to the Java world, I so far remain somewhat fuzzy about the whole concept of Monads. One problem is likely that my computer science studies at university were actually called “Applied Computer Science & Media“, which means there was a lot of media and not as much computer science as I would have liked. Hence, I’m a bit weak on some of the theoretical aspects. Nonetheless, I’m very interested in it all. But so far, while I think I have understood some parts of what is said about Monads, I haven’t really had the feeling that I got it all in my head.

But a new blog post by Eric Torreborre helped to understand a bit more. In Everyday Monads he sheds some light by using clear, understandable and useful examples. I am well aware that this is nowhere near a complete definition or explanation of monads, but it certainly helped. For the first time I really had this “lightbulb going off” feeling for this topic. Thanks, Eric!