This is a comprehensive timeline of monad tutorials and related articles.
Please update this list as it becomes outdated! If you find a tutorial, article, post, comment, or message that stands on its own as an explanation of monads, then please take a moment to paste the link somewhere on this page (register a throwaway account, if you prefer). The date, author, and blurb can be added later. This will greatly help others who are using this list as a resource for learning about monads.
“All told, a monad in X is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors of X , with product × replaced by composition of endofunctors and unit set by the identity endofunctor.”
Categories for the Working Mathematician, Saunders Mac Lane.
before 2000
1992-02 (published date) The essence of functional programming - Philip Wadler "This paper explores the use monads to structure functional programs. No prior knowledge of monads or category theory is required."
1992-08 Monads for Functional Programming (pdf) - Phil Wadler, a designer of Haskell [9100 words]. "Shall I be pure or impure?" ... "A monad is a triple (M, unit, ★) consisting of a type constructor M and two operations of the given polymorphic types."
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