Google TechTalks
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2013–2022
49:47 · 148K views · Jan 16, 2013
Douglas Crockford's Google Tech Talk explains monads without category theory or Haskell, implementing them in JavaScript and tying them to Ajax and promises. He also touches on odd asides such as coloring code by scope.
Often recommended as a demystifying monad talk in plain JavaScript, though some find it light on definitions.
11 comments from Hacker News
The one thing that made monads clearer for me was this thing this video Monads and Gonads It's probably condescending for haskellers because it shows that monads are not some enshrined primary concept but just a kind of dumb wrapper you can write in any language and you do when it's useful for you.
also, this indirectly reminded me of what I thought to be one of DC's greatest talks: Monads and Gonads ( this video )
combobulate (alpha quality as of 10/22): source code outline/cliff notes. from github README.rst "Emacs package that provides a standardized framework for manipulating and navigating your source code using tree sitter's concrete syntax tree " -> [LINK] [LINK] with [LINK] then write a iterator/loop query for language(s) editing per [LINK] tad less installation heavy (sorta) but also makes use of tree-sitter syntax queries : [LINK] (neovim with treesitter syntax) blockman usage examples: [LINK] Alternative examples / takes (per user interface): ### embedding a block of source code in a document: ** carrotsearch.gethub.io/apidocs/code-blocks ** [LINK] ### 'colorize blocking' (vs space endenting) : ** example code reference coloring: this video ### gui block programming : ** [LINK] ** [LINK]
...that's how chaining method calls end up working in most OO languages (take the Scala example in OP's article). And also in Javascript (I can't remember if there is something like `range` in js right now...): [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] .map(function (x) { return x + 2 }) .reduce(function (a, b) { return a + b }) so the "." in OOP ends up working like "->" or "->>". Heck, you can make the dot in OOP code behave like anything, even like monadic bind (`>>=` or `do` notation in Haskell), if you do OOP-style-monads in JS: this video (off-topic: this is also my main problem with OOP... the "." can actually end up meaning anything practically, as program logic is concerned, it's like some kind of "infinite operator overloading" :) )
> Do I need to know Haskell? Yes. This is enough for me to reject this blogpost. No you don't need a specific language to implement any functionality that can be implemented by a turing-complete language. I watched Crockford's monad talk [1]. He used javascript. The only problem with that talk is that he spent about 10 seconds or less explaining what a monad is (and the rest of the talk on implementation issues and his own perspective, etc, etc). I'm still waiting for a good monad discussion without CT or Haskell. (this [2] and this [3] look promising, both in python) [1] this video [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]