mordant wit

I've been trying to learn Haskell lately, and the hardest thing seems to be learning about monads. "Monads in Ruby" and "Monads for Functional Programming" helped me finally to break the ice, but more importantly, they gave me a glimpse behind the veil. I finally began to understand something that is trivial to people such as Philip Wadler, but something that never had been explained to me so succinctly. In computer science, we enjoy using mathematic models, but the science still works if you violate the math. And, much to the dismay of purely functional programming enthusiasts, we almost always do. However, when we embrace the math, sometimes the loss in flexibility is more than compensated for by the increase in functionality.