Has anyone ever encountered a Monad Transformer in the wild?
- by martingw
In my area of business - back office IT for a financial institution - it is very common for a software component to carry a global configuration around, to log it's progress, to have some kind of error handling / computation short circuit... Things that can be modelled nicely by Reader-, Writer-, Maybe-monads and the like in Haskell and composed together with monad transformers.
But there seem to some drawbacks: The concept behind monad transformers is quite tricky and hard to understand, monad transformers lead to very complex type signatures, and they inflict some performance penalty.
So I'm wondering: Are monad transformers best practice when dealing with those common tasks mentioned above?
