I didn't need an academic degree to start working in Haskell and learn abstractions such as "Traversal" or any of the others. Most of them are painfully simple

I didn't need an academic degree to start working in Haskell and learn abstractions such as "Traversal" or any of the others. Most of them are painfully simple compared to the impression one gets from their names and the jargon that comes with the territory. However the benefits of sticking with those names and jargon is that it only needs to be explained once. Analogies and metaphors help when you're starting out but you don't need to keep them around. It makes speaking precisely with colleagues in the ecosystem easier. Proofs are on another level. I've also written proofs and they require much more rigor than you will find in Haskell. It can still be done without a degree but I agree -- not useful for most line-of-business applications. However the power-to-weight ratio of learning the abstractions available in Haskell is smooth. It takes effort to acquire but it pays off in spades. That's where the "scale" comes from. Polymorphism combined with composition means that once I know a type implements "Traversal" I can use the entire language of traversals with those data types without knowing anything else about the value I'm working with. The more things that implement traversal the more rich my program becomes.