...and it's a real shame that Haskell has to be like that. I feel like much of the, sorry, mathematical wankery, is well separable from the stuff that actually makes program behavior more predictable in the functional style. I hear that F# has some success at doing exactly that.
Some blog posts are wankery. Haskell in practice is as separate and separable from it as you want.
I learned what a mathematical monad is out of interest (after using them in practice for years), and my conclusion is that it was a huge waste of time with close to zero use for my programming in Haskell.
> I learned what a mathematical monad is out of interest (after using them in practice for years)
Agreed. I regret that I tried to learn what a mathematical monad was before using them, out of a belief that it would help me get started quicker with Haskell. It didn't. It made something confusing that's actually pretty simple.
