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I am not sure if you have been paying attention to the strongly typed, category theory zealots lately (who seem to claim they hold the one and only valid functi

I am not sure if you have been paying attention to the strongly typed, category theory zealots lately (who seem to claim they hold the one and only valid functional programming viewpoint). The size of vocabulary and relations they end up juggling put any over engineered OO system to shame. It is attracting the same kind of people that 15 years ago would have reached for (and preached) the GoF book.

DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
> I am not sure if you have been paying attention to the strongly typed, category theory zealots lately Well (1) this is not inherent to all functional programming, and (2) the joke appears to imply that code written in FP will be more verbose with less content, which is surely not the case. (And also (3) I'm guessing you meant "statically typed" instead of "strongly typed", since the latter is poorly defined and not generally the subject of discussion among functional programmers that I've interacted with.) I also have met quite a few people who are into category theory, and none of them have made any claim about holding "the one and only valid functional programming viewpoint". But the people I talk to are genuine academic researchers and not armchair academicians, so perhaps there's a difference there.
- TurboHaskal 7y ago
  You are right on all points. As for the category theory zealots I have found at work or at conferences, none of them were academics, but rather what I would describe as clueless narcissists overdosed on FP Kool-aid.
  - DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
    Ah yeah, that's the unfortunate part of those communities haha. But every community has some of those. :) When you say "conferences", do you mean academic conferences or industry/language-specific conferences? I found that there were plenty of people deep into category theory at ICFP this year (an academic conference), but most of them had very reasonable perspectives on the utility of CT and things to that effect.

DonaldPShimoda 7y ago

> I am not sure if you have been paying attention to the strongly typed, category theory zealots lately Well (1) this is not inherent to all functional programming, and (2) the joke appears to imply that code written in FP will be more verbose with less content, which is surely not the case. (And also (3) I'm guessing you meant "statically typed" instead of "strongly typed", since the latter is poorly defined and not generally the subject of discussion among functional programmers that I've interacted with.) I also have met quite a few people who are into category theory, and none of them have made any claim about holding "the one and only valid functional programming viewpoint". But the people I talk to are genuine academic researchers and not armchair academicians, so perhaps there's a difference there.

TurboHaskal 7y ago
You are right on all points. As for the category theory zealots I have found at work or at conferences, none of them were academics, but rather what I would describe as clueless narcissists overdosed on FP Kool-aid.
- DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
  Ah yeah, that's the unfortunate part of those communities haha. But every community has some of those. :) When you say "conferences", do you mean academic conferences or industry/language-specific conferences? I found that there were plenty of people deep into category theory at ICFP this year (an academic conference), but most of them had very reasonable perspectives on the utility of CT and things to that effect.