No Monads are not “just a very concise definition of a List”. I do agree that some developers love to obfuscate rather than clarify because it makes them seem smart. But not everybody. I agree with the article that you really have to try and implement your own Monads to understand them. Reading articles won’t help. However unless you are programming in a pure functional language you don’t need to learn/use Monads. So just ignore it if that’s the case.