Richard Searle

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Monads and 'The curse of the excluded middle'

06 Sep 2014

The June 1024 issue of Communications of the ACM has an interesting article by Erik Meijer (famous for LINQ and Reactive Extensions) called The Curse of the Excluded Middle. The premise of the article is that “mostly functional” programming does not work.

The discussion on Monads is particularly interesting: they are the means by which a pure function interacts with the environment, i.e. has side effects.