[freyrs3]

Their usage in Haskell/OCaml etc is precisely faithful to their category theoretic definitions as can be in a general purpose language.

This debate about naming monads is pretty tiresome after so many years, if one called it "computation builder" it wouldn't change their structure or convey any notion of the laws any better than term monad. A monad at it's core is a set of algebraic relations.

[agumonkey]

But most people take comfort in having almost meaningless names. I can't blame them, when I first saw FP, I was lost in a see of nonsense. After time you see that lots of things and names are just crutches, and that structures, shapes, patterns, recursion relationships are where to look for answers.

[rndn]

Can you elaborate a bit on the last sentence? What exactly are the relations and what is the set?

[freyrs3]

If you want a description of the monad laws in Haskell terms you can Google and find like 80 expositions on the topic of various depths.

If you want a mathematical exposition. "Category Theory" by Awodey page 265 is a concise description.