Monad laws in Ruby
I’ve been using monads in Ruby since May 2016, but I haven’t really understood the theoretical basis for them. I thought about learning Haskell, but I gave up pretty soon: I didn’t think I would benefit from it. Moreover, we started using ReasonML in Planado, which improved my functional programming skills to the point I didn’t really need a new functional language in my life. Why bother with learning Haskell when you know Ruby and Reason, right?
In early 2018, I became curious about theoretical aspects of functional programming, especially the monad laws. That’s when I realized that I really needed Haskell, mainly because everyone used it in their articles. It was extremely annoying because I couldn’t even read the code. How was I going to apply those things in Ruby if I can’t even understand what they’re saying? So I got a little help.
I grabbed my laptop and a friend who knows Haskell and figured out how to describe the three monad laws using Ruby’s dry-monads gem.