Holy crap. This. To paraphrase: "English, mofo. Do you speak it?!?" :-) I have been programming for over 30 years (which I suppose means nothing if it's ju

Holy crap. This. To paraphrase: "English, mofo. Do you speak it?!?" :-) I have been programming for over 30 years (which I suppose means nothing if it's just doing the same year over 30 times, but bear with me). Every other language (at the risk of being largely self selected, I know) I have ever worked on seems to incrementally add things or shift ideas around a little bit. Some communities might try to helpfully explain things to newcomers. But the perception of the Haskell community is that they revel in being as cryptic as possible in their purity. I'm not even sure if the above comment was serious (it was probably deadly serious), or absolute troll fodder nonsense. I know (more or less???) what a functor is, and I know what IFF means. Unfortunately, most of what I remember from mathematics comes down to a function has a domain of inputs and a range of outputs, and being a function implies you can predict the output from the input; a "type" is a rule for describing a set, possibly infinite (not much use for computing), of values; values can be "scalar", or multidimensional such as a vector/matrix/tensor. I know that "category" means something very specific to you guys, but not what. You lost me.