Up your game by stacking Applicatives in Scala

Monads are very useful in many different situations.

But they get a little unwieldy when we have different Monads nested inside each other.

In these cases Monad Transformers come to the rescue. They allow us to compose different Monads into one that shares the functionalities of all of them.

But sometimes we want to combine the behavior of Applicatives in the same way. This is especially useful when we have to combine independent tasks.

In this post we will see how to do this in Scala with the use of the Cats library.

But let's first look at an example of Monad Transformers.

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Hands on Monoids in Scala – Applying categories to birdwatching

What do Monoids in Scala have to do with birdwatching?

Before I come to that I would like to mention that since I'm coming from F# and recently started with Scala, being able to use type classes in my code is new to me.

I find this really exciting which I'd like to share.

So this post is maybe not a complete cohesive tutorial an Monoids but I hope that it is a fun little teaser for looking into things like functional programming, Scala, Cats, Haskell, type classes or maybe even category theory.

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