It's about as difficult as describing vectors in math. Vectors aren't really "little arrows" or "things with magnitude and direction" (because then functions wouldn't count), I think there's a similarly cryptic saying that "a vector is just an element of a vector space" or "a tensor is anything that transforms like a tensor".
replyIn both cases what they really are is an abstract concept defined by things that satisfy some definitions, but in practice it's easier to just look at a few concrete examples like Maybe.
And here I was convinced that they’re burritos!
replyI will say that explaining functors to my coworkers was always much simpler, and then naturally led to monads
I suspect all branches of tech have their rite of passage.
replyFor haskellers, it is writing a monad tutorial
For javascripters, it is writing a framework
For make-stuff-with-LLM people, it is producing a diagram explaining your code generation factory
... and so on
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