eli5 What’s a monad?

Question

Don’t tell me it’s just a monoid in the category of endofunctors.

In: 0

Answer 1

You catching the joke is funnier than me saying it.

The ELI5 answer is that in functional programming, a monad is a value wrapped in a context. For example the Maybe monda can look like “Just 3” or “Nothing”. Now, if you want to work with the actual value, you have to consider that there could be no value.