What would be my motivation for learning Haskell other than learning monads? Learning an entire programming language (one that expressly states practicality as one of its non-goals and ostensibly only exists to advance type theory) just to that I can learn a concept that only appears useful in that language, seems like a waste of my limited time.
It's "write some Haskell", not "learn Haskell". It's much harder to learn Haskell than understanding monads, you just need to see how some look like on practice.
But, well, I don't have any reason for you to do that. You just asked how, and I gave you a way. If you don't have any interest in learning it, there's absolutely no problem, but posting "I never really tried, but that thing is bad because I haven't learned it already" FUD is pretty bad.
My contention is that people are learning monads because they’re on a journey to learn Haskell, then when they finally grok them, they turn around and say they’re this big important thing that all programmers should understand, because Haskell showed them how important they are.
But so far, no monad tutorial has made a good case for why they’re actually useful, other than for learning Haskell. And most advice for how to learn them sounds exactly like what you said: “oh if you still don’t get it, you just need to write more Haskell.” You can see why that’s a bit of a disappointment, right?
Basically, you have people making this argument:
- monads are important outside of Haskell
- to understand why, you have to learn them
- to learn them, you should write Haskell
Which I’m sure you can understand comes off as a bit unconvincing.
Oh, ok. If you want to design a language nowadays, knowing monads (and other abstractions) is absolutely necessary, even if just to reject them in an informed fashion.
If you want to use a language to program, knowing them will help you with approximately nothing, because most languages either have awful ergonomics for that kind of abstraction or bring them on much more limited ways that you are better learning how they specifically apply to the language than the general concept. If you learn the general concept, the specific cases will be easier, but unless you plan on learning several languages, it's not worth it.
Anyway, one large exception is if you plan on doing heavily abstract C# libraries. The C# support for monads is almost as general as Haskell.
