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An Informal Introduction to Monoids, Functors and Monads in the Context of Machine Learning

Most articles introducing monoids, functors, and monads do so in contrived or simple scenarios. Here we visit those concepts in real-world (or close to) scenarios to help you remember and see how these concepts can apply to your code and make things cleaner. By introducing more and more constraints and requirements, as often happens in real-world software, we will see first-hand how and when to apply these concepts. We go from a tangled spaghetti-code mess to clean abstractions that are extensible as your problems and requirements change over time. We introduce these concepts in the context of machine learning (while not going in-depth into ML) to give you a flavored introduction.