Monads are the talk of the town right now, everyone is saying something about them and much of it makes little sense, especially when you try and combine the messages from all of the sources.

This talk will take a different tack. We will have a quick definition of a few terms and concepts, but that will be quick and to the point. Instead I will concentrate on the mechanics of Monads, why you would want to use them at all, how you can use them to solve real problems in different situations, and what we can ask for from our languages and tools to make them even more useful and easy to adopt.

Along the way we will look at many examples in Java 8, and how syntactic constructs ease their use in languages like Scala and Haskell.