Monads And Causality

Geenerally I don't post "just links" on my blog. But this time I'll make an exception, because these are very lucid explanations to difficult questions.

Question 1 : How do I explain Monads to a programmer without resorting to mathematics (Category Theory)? (This in turn came out of an email exchange with Peter Van Roy about explicit state vs monadic state (as used in Haskell))

The answer is here. This is the best answer I've ever seen which skirts Category Theory and various Haskellisms completely.

Question 2 : How can you really know if one factor causes another? (This came out of a conversation I had with a programmer working on a probabilistic classifer [I am working with them on integrating Machine Learning into their product suite])

Here are two sets of slides explaining the approach pioneered by Dr Judea Pearl at UCLA. To oversimplify, a new operator is added to probability theory with a separate semantics. This is a bit beyond standard probability but quite enlightening once you "get it".