Sigfpe explains comonads

I just discovered this very cool discussion of comonads, which starts with a really lovely review of monads. The basic idea: monads allow you to compose two functions that inject their inputs into some "fancy structure." If we have functions f : a → m b and g : b → m c (i.e., Kleisli arrows), we can lift g to a function m b → m (m c) by the law that m is a functor, and then use the "flattening" monad law to unwrap the extra layer of structure on the result. As sigfpe (what is his/her real name?) puts it: "twice as fancy is still just fancy." I like that this provides an intuition for monads using the map/flatten formulation, as opposed to the usual unit/bind formulation, while still preserving the notion of "plumbing."

As for comonads, I'm starting to see the duality: comonads allow us to take some things already inside some fancy structure and map them down to something outside of that structure. For functions (co-Kleisli arrows) f : m a → b and g : m b → c, we can map f to a function m (m a) → m b, compose this with g on one end and the comonad operation m a → m (m a) on the other to get a function m a → c.

I'm still working on understanding some of the applications.