A list is a monad

Another tutorial which makes monads about 100x more impossible to understand for me by relating them to something else and describing all the weird ways that they are NOT that thing.

IMO if you already have it, this will be a lovely comparison full of insight, but if you haven't then it's full of confusing statements.

IMO what they are is utterly unimportant, except to mathematicians, and what you can do with them is more to the point.

The fact that explanations are so often in Haskell just makes them more unintelligible because you really need to know what problem they solve.

The reason that the explanations are all in Haskell is that Haskell is the only language that is reasonably popular that implements monad and calls it a monad, and 90% of the people looking up "What is a monad" are trying to learn Haskell.