Might fuck around and have some Reckons about monad pedagogy and arguing about it on twitter

I feel like something we could do well to remember is that the well is already very much poisoned: there are numerous instances of people from both camps behaving really rather poorly, to the extent that people often enter these discussions with their guard up, expecting a fight

That’s just how things are now, and I think it would probably be helpful to be mindful of that and try to be extra aware of how your actions might be perceived by someone, especially if this is the first time you’ve interacted with them

Programming twitter in particular can be very tiresome, and I think unsolicited commentary from people who don’t follow you is often completely irrelevant, completely wrong, or both.

Of course, this becomes more of a drag the larger following you have. At a certain point I think people get bored of expending effort weighing up “should I engage with this person or just block/ignore,” only to find that they indeed should have just blocked/ignored

So if you’re entering someone’s mentions to dispute something they’ve said, and you don’t follow them and they don’t know you, maybe try not to be a marginal case; try to signal “hi, you aren’t going to regret not immediately blocking me”

I think another aspect of this where I’m starting to change my opinion is that getting in fights all the time doesn’t really appear to be doing anyone much good, however much certain people might deserve to be yelled at

Because a common point of contention is definitions, and so I wonder if there may be lessons to be learned from arguments over other linguistic phenomena, such as “literally” in the sense of “figuratively”

Like, so much breath has been wasted arguing that using “literally” is this sense is imprecise, doesn’t make sense, etc etc, but people still use it all the time and it seems like none of this arguing has achieved anything at all, other than maybe ruining a few friendships?

Maybe it’s not actually the end of the world if people in other communities start using “monad” in an imprecise sense. We already perverted its meaning (albeit only slightly) when we stole it from category theory, to be completely fair

There are already tons of examples where a certain technical term has a completely different meaning across different programming contexts. Even “Functor” has at least three distinct meanings, depending on whether you ask a C++, ocaml, or Haskell programmer

I think at a basic level people are often just trying to share cool programming techniques they’re excited about, and I feel like those of us in FP communities can probably sympathise with being scorned for sharing cool techniques you were excited about

Also yeah, I know you only have to scroll back a few tweets in my timeline to see me utterly failing to live up to any of this. I’m gonna try harder next time

shout out to @ReinH, @RosaCtrl, and @tpflug for helping me see all this stuff more clearly