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A list is a monad
The term “monad” is often invoked when describing patterns in functional programming. Yet explanations typically swing between high-level metaphors and deep mathematical abstractions. Each approach offers part of the picture, intuition without precision, or rigor without intuition but seldom both.
At the heart of monadic programming is the idea that you write one function, say, f(x) = x + 1, and then reuse it across different contexts without rewriting control-flow logic. Unit moves a raw value into the monadic context, sometimes called “lifting”, “identity”, “return”, “wrap”, or “promotion”, or some fancy operation names like “liftM” or “liftA”. With flatMap, you both apply your lookup and collapse the layers in one go, so you can seamlessly sequence optional, error-handling, or asynchronous operations (e.g. promises/tasks) without ever wrestling with nested monadic types.
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