After spending hours trying to find articles explaining the damn thing without resorting to "let's take this contrived example..." or "let's take a real life example, generating pseudo-random numbers" (seriously?!), I'm still left with frustration. Eventually I'd reached out to Kaloz, who pointed me to one of his earlier explorations of the topic. His example is here, but I'm still in the dark why is it any better than a simple foldLeft. In the code below I refactored slightly Kaloz's code to keep the generic part apart from the specific solutions. A second foldLeft-using function is provided to match the signature of the function using the State monad, although I don't see any additional value in that.
Kaloz? What am I missing?
