Douglas Crockford: Monads and Gonads (YUIConf Evening Keynote)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Mentioned as a great talk alongside Crockford's book, and mostly quoted for his quip that once you understand monads you lose the ability to explain them.
What it is
Douglas Crockford's YUIConf 2012 evening keynote tries to explain monads in a way programmers can actually understand, in the context of JavaScript. He aims to break the 'monad tutorial curse'.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2013 to 2020.
What Hacker News said
Recommends icc97 · 2018-07 · on “Ask HN: What you wish you'd known before getting into JavaScript?”
Yes, because it's a great book. Everything in the book is still relevant, closures, currying, object binding. If you use the syntax he suggests all your code will still work. Just because let and const mean you can avoid some problems doesn't mean you shouldn't know why we have them. The Monads and Gonads talk [0] he gave is also great. [0]: [this video]
Cites mheathr · 2013-06 · on “One Year Later: Review of PyCharm 2.7 from a Vim User’s Perspective”
I am a huge fan of VIM's design (and by extension EVIL [LINK] in Emacs, which is what I use most of the time), and I agree that all to most of this is achievable in Emacs. I really like Jetbrains products though, and when I am on Windows those are my goto tools as I don't have the UNIX user space to leverage alongside Emacs or VIM. They provide a great environment for those languages that don't have great support outside of commercial IDEs or for people turned off by Emacs/VIM. My first experience was using IDEA for Java (both VIM and Emacs support for Java is an area where they are weakest somewhat surprisingly) and I was very happy with IDEA, so I tried PyCharm later on when I was on Windo
Cites vo2maxer · 2020-02 · on “An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra (2012)”
Douglas Crockford on Monads: In addition to its being good and useful, it’s also cursed and the curse of the monad is that once you get the epiphany, once you understand - "oh that's what it is" - you lose the ability to explain it to anybody else. [this video]