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It's not clear to me that category theory, functional programming, what have you, provide insight into why things work. In fact, it seems like they might cut th
by bykovich 9y ago
It's not clear to me that category theory, functional programming, what have you, provide insight into why things work. In fact, it seems like they might cut the opposite way -- moving from vicissitudes to simple abstractions.
- nimih 9y agoCategory theory provides the tools (a language, a set of theorems, etc) to understand why certain things are necessarily true, rather than just "true in practice" or true because of a happy coincidence, similar (IMO) to how complexity analysis gives you the tools to know that merge sort necessarily has a certain baseline performance, rather than just happening to run through all your unit tests quickly.