Douglas Crockford: Monads and Gonads (YUIConf Evening Keynote)

Douglas Crockford on Monads: In addition to its being good and useful, it’s also cursed and the curse of the monad is that once you get the epiphany, once you understand - "oh that's what it is" - you lose the ability to explain it to anybody else. ▶ this video

Yes, because it's a great book. Everything in the book is still relevant, closures, currying, object binding. If you use the syntax he suggests all your code will still work. Just because let and const mean you can avoid some problems doesn't mean you shouldn't know why we have them. The Monads and Gonads talk [0] he gave is also great. [0]: ▶ this video

... and failed: > Once you understand what monads are, and why they exist, you lose the ability to explain them to anybody. -- Douglas Crockford [1] [1] ▶ this video

I am a huge fan of VIM's design (and by extension EVIL link in Emacs, which is what I use most of the time), and I agree that all to most of this is achievable in Emacs. I really like Jetbrains products though, and when I am on Windows those are my goto tools as I don't have the UNIX user space to leverage alongside Emacs or VIM. They provide a great environment for those languages that don't have great support outside of commercial IDEs or for people turned off by Emacs/VIM. My first experience was using IDEA for Java (both VIM and Emacs support for Java is an area where they are weakest somewhat surprisingly) and I was very happy with IDEA, so I tried PyCharm later on when I was on Windows and using Python there. However, Emacs makes use of Python's REPL much more fluently than what I've experienced in PyCharm where the IDE has no interaction with the REPL outside of user engagement. PyCharm in comparison seems entirely ignorant that it has a REPL it can exploit and integrating tightly with it would pay dividends. Coming from Emacs where REPL integrations tend to have at least some sense of intelligence about them this was jarring. PyCharm's intentions though are also very nice and isn't something I've found in Emacs or VIM to the same extent. The IDE still has the same trait I've seen in Eclipse, VisualStudio, XCode, and Jetbrains' products though where it makes determining what the project entails into an overly complicated affair though, an area where VIM and Emacs hav