There are a few words in programming that seem designed to scare people off:
functor, applicative, monad.
If you've tried to look them up, you've probably bounced off an explanation that felt either smug or useless. That usually isn't because you're missing some key insight. Once people really understand these things, they often lose the ability to explain them plainly.
It's a bit of a catch-22.
The frustrating part? You likely already have a working intuition for them.
If you've ever:
- mapped over something that might exist
- chained async operations that depend on each other
- treated "nothing" as a real case instead of a bug
then you're already in the territory. You learned it under pressure, not from a definition.
These ideas keep showing up because real systems need a way to deal with "maybe", "later", and "this can fail" — without everything turning into a mess.
I wrote a longer piece exploring this without assuming prior FP knowledge, and without pretending the names are the important part. Elm is the concrete example, but it isn't really the point.
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