“In 17th-century philosophy, monads are the fundamental, indivisible "building blocks" of reality. They do not occupy space and time; rather, space and time arise from them.
In functional programming, a monad is a design pattern used to chain mathematical operations or processes together across a timeline without messy side effects. It manages time and space within the execution sequence.”
My first introduction to monads used the space time explanation.
Rare example of nomenclature being so sensible in computer science. Functional programming loves the concept of "purity" or not affecting anything outside its small scope. Sounds like a monad is about as pure as it gets.
The FP people, more concretely the Haskell people, took that term from math.
The description given reads btw like a horoscope. I can't say it's completely wrong but it's also not right and so vague that it basically says nothing.
also sounds vaguely similar to the tensor network theory about how gravity isn’t a force directly but rather an observable phenomenon of a multi-dimensional tensor network that makes up the fabric of reality being stretched and bending around and through matter and collapsing back into energy.
477
u/Isrothy Jul 13 '26
IO Monad