The Free Monad is something I’ve been having a great deal of difficulty wrapping my head around. It’s one of those Haskell concepts that ends up being far simpler than any of the articles on the Net would have you think. So, here’s a whirlwind tour of this Monad and how it can be super handy. First, imagine you’re building [...]

Yesterday’s artice on Monads in pictures has been translated into Japanese by Eugene Yokota. Many thanks to Eugene for such a rapid translation! [...]

This is not a tutoral on monads, nor will I use any math terms here. This is for people who have learned enough about monads to use them, but want to get a better picture of what they’re doing and why they exist. Functions One way to develop a first intuition about monads is to follow the progression of abstractions [...]

The artice on Git that I wrote a couple years back, Git From the Bottom Up, has been translated into Japanese by Noriyuki Komatsuzaki. Thank you so much, Noriyuki! [...]

The following is an amalgam of several letters I sent to Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, expressing my concern about the direction GPL licensing is taking, and why I disagree with some of the objectives of the Free Software Foundation. [...]

After spending a good while trying to understand monads in Haskell, and why the Haskell world is so fascinated by them, I finally understand why they aren’t as exciting to other languages, or why they are completely missing from languages like C++: because they’re mostly already there. At its simplest, a monad is an abstraction of a value which knows how to apply functions to that value, returning a new monad. In other words, it’s a way to turn values into little packages that wrap additional functionality around that value. Sounds a lot like what an object does… [...]