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> What is happening here is like taking a 2-line program that adds together two numbers and dressing it up into thousands of lines of OOP, until you have Additi

> What is happening here is like taking a 2-line program that adds together two numbers and dressing it up into thousands of lines of OOP, until you have AdditionObjectFactoryGetterSetter objects being created by AdditionObjectFactoryGetterSetterFactory objects. Then you can bring in powerful OOP tools, but the only things they help you with are understanding the excess complication you added in. Maybe the sheer scale of that structure is beautiful to someone, but we're discussing whether scientists should bother learning it. In my opinion, this severely misrepresents what's happening. Your example is simply adding extrinsic, incidental complexity and this is not what the categorical treatment of this is doing, in my opinion. The additional complexity introduced by the CT machinery is not a lot and most of the complexity is intrinsic to the problem.

feanaro 7y ago
Argh, I wrote this in an editor and accidentally posted only a partial response. I cannot edit anymore so I'm responding with the full comment: > What is happening here is like taking a 2-line program that adds together two numbers and dressing it up into thousands of lines of OOP, until you have AdditionObjectFactoryGetterSetter objects being created by AdditionObjectFactoryGetterSetterFactory objects. Then you can bring in powerful OOP tools, but the only things they help you with are understanding the excess complication you added in. Maybe the sheer scale of that structure is beautiful to someone, but we're discussing whether scientists should bother learning it. In my opinion, this severely misrepresents what's happening. Your example is simply adding extrinsic, incidental complexity and this is not what the categorical treatment of this is doing, in my opinion. The additional complexity introduced by the CT machinery is not a lot and most of the complexity is intrinsic to the problem. What this does is to add rigor to something that you (or a chemist) may understand intuitively. To a person with a working, intuitive knowledge about a subject, that may seem a bit pointless, but it is nevertheless useful since an intuitive understanding might overlook reasoning holes or edge cases. Building upon this result may yield further useful insights. Granted, this really may not be useful to a working chemist. The cost/benefit ratio of a chemist doing chemistry is more favourable than investing a lot of time in CT, hoping for a large breakthrough.

feanaro 7y ago

Argh, I wrote this in an editor and accidentally posted only a partial response. I cannot edit anymore so I'm responding with the full comment: > What is happening here is like taking a 2-line program that adds together two numbers and dressing it up into thousands of lines of OOP, until you have AdditionObjectFactoryGetterSetter objects being created by AdditionObjectFactoryGetterSetterFactory objects. Then you can bring in powerful OOP tools, but the only things they help you with are understanding the excess complication you added in. Maybe the sheer scale of that structure is beautiful to someone, but we're discussing whether scientists should bother learning it. In my opinion, this severely misrepresents what's happening. Your example is simply adding extrinsic, incidental complexity and this is not what the categorical treatment of this is doing, in my opinion. The additional complexity introduced by the CT machinery is not a lot and most of the complexity is intrinsic to the problem. What this does is to add rigor to something that you (or a chemist) may understand intuitively. To a person with a working, intuitive knowledge about a subject, that may seem a bit pointless, but it is nevertheless useful since an intuitive understanding might overlook reasoning holes or edge cases. Building upon this result may yield further useful insights. Granted, this really may not be useful to a working chemist. The cost/benefit ratio of a chemist doing chemistry is more favourable than investing a lot of time in CT, hoping for a large breakthrough.