Fronads

Frontend monads with consistent and beginner-friendly naming conventions.

docs

What is a monad?

Monads are function composers. They let you compose functions together to control your program flow.

• Monads let you map a function to a value.
• Monads are only ever in one state at a time. Each of their methods returns either the same monad or a new one in a different state.

Almost monads

Monads are a specific combination of ideas that you probably already understand. Because of this it can be hard to understand the whole but easy to grasp the parts.

Some almost monad things to help you understand:

• Promises are almost monads: They provide a consistent interface to structure the flow of async data
• Promises are almost monads: They can only ever be in one state at a time. Resolved, Rejected.
• Arrays are almost monads: They can always have a function mapped to their value, regardless of what they contain.
• Array.map is almost monadic: It provides a level of immutability by returning a new array with the values changed.

All monads

All monads have these three methods. Some languages have different names for them, but their idea remains the same.

• Unit
• flatMap
• map

Unit

Unit is the monad constructor. It takes a value and returns a new monad of that state. Because monads deal with program flow and most monads have sort of sub types that represent one or more the states. The Unit's purpose is to let you declare a single monad of a specific state. E.g.

Some/None Left/Right Fetching/Error/Success

function unitExample() {
    return test ? Some(value) : None();
}

The above function is consistent because it always returns a monad. However if test is true it will return aSome monad containing a value, otherwise it will return a None.

9/10 times you'd use the specific unit constructor for the monad you want but each monad does have a .unit method

flatMap

The second core function of a monad is Flatmap. It's not however the flatter version of map, in fact flatMap provideds the basis for map. Flatmap says I'll pass the current value to your function, you return me another monad.

Other terms: bind, chain

Fronads chooses flatMap/map because they pair nicely.

map

Map builds off both unit and Flatmap, and is essentially value => flatMap(Unit(value)). Map is a convenient flatMap. It knows that you probably want the same monad again and so automatically creates the one you want. Letting you do things like:

Some(person).map(person => person.age) 

The above statement will return a new some containing the persons age.