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Bruno Oliveira and I are working on a functional pearl called The Monad Zipper (*). You know how dealing with monad transformers can be quite awkward -- especially when developing highly modular programs where every component comes with its own effects?Well, we bring relief in this situation by applying Huet's zipper to a type-level data structure: the monad stack.We're submitting to ICFP on April 2, and would greatly appreciate your feedback on the current draft. Please let us know what you think of the presented approach, the clarity and style of writing, examples of situations where you could have used the monad zipper, ...(*) not to be confused with the zipper monad

We had to cover monads eventually, and there are many great monad tutorials out there (see, for example, here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Tutorials#Using_monads). In fact, there are web resources concerned solely with organizing the many monad tutorials available in the wild, and developing new monad tutorials seems to be a popular sport in the Haskell community.Today, Ralf Lämmel's lecture goes back to the roots, essentially revisiting Wadler's "The essence of functional programming"—the 1992 paper that discovered monads and popularized their use in functional programming. Ralf Lämmel's lecture and accompanying code distribution show Wadler's seminal insight: those original scenarios and observations still make sense today. Indeed, Simon Marlow (a Haskell/GHC high priest @ MSR Cambridge) recently noted: "it's still the best monad tutorial" (see http://twitter.com/simonmar/status/21397398061).