Monads can make your code much cleaner and safer, especially for handling errors and chaining operations. Today, we aim to understand what a monad is, specifically the Maybe monad, and see how it helps in functional programming. By the end of this lesson, you'll know how to create and use a Maybe monad and how to chain operations using the bind method.

A monad is a design pattern used in functional programming to handle program logic that involves wrapping a value, performing operations, and managing side effects. Monad is an extension of Functor. Effectively, Monad does the same thing as the Functor, but it provides additional logic to handle all possible scenarios like data of incorrect type or None instead of value.

The Maybe monad represents values that might or might not exist. It helps avoid errors when you try to use missing values. Let's create the Maybe monad in Python step-by-step:

This constructor holds a value that can either be None (absence of value) or any other type .