alright cheers man! that looks great. I’ll try doing some coding and watching some of the videos too. I’ll report back after the long weekend as i can give it a good go then 😄

👍:skin-tone-3:

ah yeah, this is good too (i would read this after the http://purelyfunctional.tv): https://mostly-adequate.gitbooks.io/mostly-adequate-guide/ch08.html

ok great thanks man

@U61HA86AG how long did it take you to grok monads and things?

honestly i found it pretty easy; but there are two parts to learning them. there's learning how they work in the abstract, and then learning how specific monads work in the concrete (there are different kinds of monad, and they do different things, though they're all the same abstractly - think how maps, vectors and sets are all sequences, but work differently individually)

they're much easier to grok after you've used them yourself

which is kind of a meme: 'once you understand monads, you lose the ability to explain them'

the thing is you've probably used monoids/functors/monads without realising what they were (they show up everywhere), so that makes them easier to learn

got ya thanks for that insight. I think for me i always feel scared with the names of things and get stuck very easily on math-sy terms

yeah the names just come from maths; the thing is they're such abstract concepts that the only way to give them precise names is to use these scary terms

but they're only scary until you get an intuition for them 🙂

oh yeah i agree totally haha

ok great thanks again man :thumbsup:

there's been talk about calling Monoids, say, Concatables, but the thing is that Monoids aren't only about concatenation, so it wouldn't be as precise as the term Monoid

https://twitter.com/lambdista/status/888312452890456064

and these words already have well-defined meanings from mathematics, so it's like, why not use them instead of inventing our own

yeah i was thinking about that haha

it's not like our industry is free of 'scary' words anyway 😛 'integer', 'floating-point', 'persistent data structure', 'algorithm', 'namespace', ...

thats also very true

As said the category part can be a big distraction. It’s easier to start with if you think of it as some apis for very common operations / patterns

I'd agree that the category part can be a distraction. I actually found some of the Scala functional programming tutorials and Haskell stuff an easier intro. I think the issue with cat theory in Clojure is that there are other idiomatic approaches to passing state and dealing with side effects, etc. that are sometimes easier to grasp than monadic types and not having static typing does reduce the practical value of some of this stuff. Although it's useful to understand the theory.

thanks for the insight ❤️