Monads are not special

• Monads are not fundamental to computation.
• Monads are but one type of structure that can be described in Haskell (others include groups, monoids, semilattices and posets).
• The IO constructor and its monadic interface allow embedding of imperative programs in Haskell.
• Whenever we ask ourselves if there is anything special about IO, we really should be asking if there is anything special about imperative programming.
• Imperative programming is mainly of historical interest
• It is widely known that imperative programming does not scale.
• The future of programming will probably not be imperative.
• We should move away from relying on the IO constructor in Haskell.

Further reading #

• Imperative functional programming (SPJ and Wadler, 1992)
• https://wiki.haskell.org/What_a_Monad_is_not
• http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functional