What the hell is a Monad?

Monads are one of the most powerful tools in functional programming languages, yet widely misunderstood as an unexplainable and over-abstracted whimsy only describable as "monoids in the category of endofunctors."

In my talk, I will endeavour to explain that monads are fundamentally just boxes you can put things in. We will draw parallels between other abstractions like classes, but we will also look at what other capabilities they have.

By the end I hope to have either brought a newfound appreciation for the mathematical beauty of haskell, or a fundamental revulsion at the mind of mathematicians. Just as long as you get what a monad is, that's ok.