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0 pointskqr4y ago0 comments

I mean, as long as you have a flatMap/concatMap function JavaScript arrays are technically a monad too. But that is a practically meaningless thing to say.

What we talk about when we have about monads is the highly generic interface coupled with the highly generic combinators. This is not something shared by arrays and promises. In other words, none of them are monads in any practically meaningful sense.

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chriswarbo4y ago

> I mean, as long as you have a flatMap/concatMap function JavaScript arrays are technically a monad too. But that is a practically meaningless thing to say.

It's not "practically meaningless"; it's depth-first-search logic programming (as per How to Replace Failure by a List of Successes https://rkrishnan.org/files/wadler-1985.pdf )

kqrOP4y ago

I'm not saying the operations themselves are meaningless. I'm saying that "being a monad" only means something beyond "supporting flatMap" when there's a library of generic monad combinators involved.

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