3 ms·
I'm not very familiar with category theory and can't really make heads or tails of what you're writing there, but I think the idea behind the statement that "ad
by thinkpad20 11y ago
I'm not very familiar with category theory and can't really make heads or tails of what you're writing there, but I think the idea behind the statement that "adjunctions aren't highly relevant in programming" is to say that there isn't a huge amount of immediate utility of adjunctions as a programmer. On the other hand, programmers use monads all the time (even if they don't realize it, which is the most common case, as the monad in question is the evaluation of the imperative language they're writing in). Of course, to be honest, I wouldn't know an adjunction from a hole in the ground, so perhaps the same is true for adjunctions -- but I've never heard of them so I'm assuming that's not the case. Either way, what makes monads worth understanding is precisely how useful they are in day-to-day, real-world programming, and in particular understanding how they're used in Haskell is practically essential for understanding almost any extant Haskell code.
- Chinjut 11y agoThe purpose of that comment is to note precisely the same thing applying to adjunctions as you note applying to monads: programmers use adjunctions all the time even if they don't realize it. "I've never heard of them so I'm assuming that's not the case"? Well, hey, most programmers have never heard about monads either. Explicitly having heard of a thing is, by definition, not a requirement for it to be something which one "use[s]... all the time (even if they don't realize it...)". [I'm not saying everyone needs to go out and learn about adjunctions. But they're in exactly the same area as monads in terms of their applicability as a concept to programming. It's weird to consider the one a down-to-earth, comes-up-all-the-time notion and the other some airy-fairy academic construct.]