Monads: they're incredibly useful, and also maybe a little intimidating. Beginner functional programmers often cringe when they hear the term. JavaScript legend Douglas Crockford once said that monads are cursed – that once you understand monads for yourself you lose the ability to explain them to others. In the programming language F#, monads are called “computational expressions” mostly so people aren’t scared away.
But I think all this fear and mysticism around the dreaded “M-word” need not be so. So in this post, I’m going to attempt to put a small crack in the curse, not by attempting to explain all of monad theory in general, but instead by thoroughly diving into a concrete example of a monad in a specific language: the Maybe monad in JavaScript[1].
If you’ve been putting off learning about monads – or maybe have never even heard of them until now – then this post is for you. It will provide just enough material to give you a sense of what monads are and what they can do. From there you should have a solid stepping off point from which you can jump into reading something like this without trepidation.
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