Theoretical Computer Science Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for theoretical computer scientists and researchers in related fields. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Most resource regarding categorical notions in programming describe monads, but I've never seen a categorical description of monad transformers.
How could monad transformers be described in the terms of category theory?
In particular, I'd be interested in:
According to Oleksandr Manzuk, they are "translation of a monad along an adjunction", see "Calculating Monad Transformers with Category Theory". By the way, that's the third hit on Google for "monad transformer categorically". The first is a Stackoverflow question about this and the second is your question.
Augmenting Andrej's answer:
There is still no widespread agreement on the appropriate interface monad transformers should support in the functional programming context. Haskell's MTL is the de-facto interface, but Jaskelioff's Monatron is an alternative.
One of the earlier technical reports by Moggi, an abstract view of programming languages, discusses what should be the right notion of transformer to some extent (section 4.1). In particular, he discusses the notion of an operation for a monad, which he (20 years later) revisits with Jaskelioff in monad transformers as monoid transformers.
(This notion of operation is different from Plotkin and Power's notion of an algebraic operation for a monad, which amounts to a Kleisli arrow.)
