what is a monad in haskell?
A monad in Haskell is a design pattern that provides a way to structure code for sequential computations, allowing for the composition of operations that have side effects, such as IO or error handling. Monads are often used to abstract away the details of effects, making it easier to write programs that are easy to reason about and maintain. Monads are implemented as a type class in Haskell, with instances of the type class providing specific implementations of the operations for a particular kind of computation.
Who thought of the idea for a monad in haskell?
The concept of monads in computer science can be traced back to the mathematician and logician Haskell Curry. However, the specific implementation and application of monads in the functional programming language Haskell was introduced by Philip Wadler, who was a language designer for Haskell. Wadler's work on monads in Haskell provided a foundation for the functional programming community to build upon and helped to establish monads as a powerful tool for programming with side effects in functional languages.