Disappointment

["Paolo Donadeo" <p.donadeo@gmail.com>]

I'm disappointed with myself and my incredibly low IQ. Late this
evening I decided -- and this is the third time -- to be enlightened
by the concept of monad.

I like functional programming, but monads [1] must be too little to be
grabbed by my mind. This time the interest in monads was aroused by
the interesting article of David Teller, Arnaud Spiwack and Till
Varoquaux [2] about the error monad, but for using the library they
wrote I need at least some knowledge about monads and the do-notation.

I tried with some tutorials found around, but I still cannot catch the
point: what the hell is a monad?

I ask you all: can anyone make me a practical example, something
involving strings, files, the network, an image or sound processing
algorithm, something vaguely real? Not abstract mathematical
structures, beautiful algebraic properties and general statements,
please: the net is full of such tutorials, especially Haskell fan
sites ;-)

Thanks in advance for your patience.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(symbol)
[2] http://www.univ-orleans.fr/lifo/Members/David.Teller/publications/ml2008.pdf


-- 
Ing. Paolo Donadeo
Studio Associato 4Sigma
Website: http://www.4sigma.it
Personal website: http://www.donadeo.net/blog
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:wq