Monads, also known as Kleisli triples in Category Theory, are an (endo-)functor together with two natural transformations, which are surprisingly useful in pure languages like Haskell, but this talk will NOT reference monads. Ever. (Well, at least not in this talk.)



Instead what I intend to impress upon an audience of newcomers to Haskell is the wide array of freely available libraries most of which are liberally licensed open source software, intuitive package management, practical build tools, reasonable documentation (when you know how to read it and where to find it), interactive shell (or REPL), mature compiler, stable runtime, testing tools that will blow your mind away, and a small but collaborative and knowledgeable community of developers. Oh, and some special features of Haskell - the language - too!