>How do people that don't have PhDs bridge the gap in their knowledge from what's commonly taught/used (OOP and it's design patterns) to thinking in terms of mo

>How do people that don't have PhDs bridge the gap in their knowledge from what's commonly taught/used (OOP and it's design patterns) to thinking in terms of monads/monoids/functors/etc. ? I can just speak for myself. Started programming via vocational training (apprenticeship for the title 'computer science expert' in germany) about 4 years ago. Learned programming with python, which I loved for the productivity it gave me, the whole superpower yadiya. Was assigned some webrelated tasks, so I got in touch with javascript. My style in these languages was actually 'functional' without me knowing about functional programming - but only to some extent. Mutability, nonstatic typing etc. So, wanting to become a better programmer, I googled things like "advanced python", which yielded things like decorators, generators and metaclasses. In some video about map, filter and reduce something in me clicked - I didn't want to hide attributes and state in classes and objects anymore. It's not modular, it's not atomic, it's not beautiful. I came across Rich Hickeys talks [1] and immediately saw that I'm ...home. The paradigms just click with me, I can't imagine falling back to impurity and oop (unless it can't be avoided for whatever reasons). (I still don't write clojure though, for now I'm still enjoying playing around in python and haskell where I can (you may substitute python with js)) And, honestly - if you have the curiosity to learn Haskell, do you really need a phd? I've taught myself bits of maths in the last four years (higher mathematics - number theory (not tech related, just curiosity), graph theory, category theory etc), just driven by curiosity. That being said: If you'd ask me about these topics on the street, I wouldn't claim to be a mathematician, far from it. I just satisfied my curiosity. I want to understand. Not some math or haskell in specific, but life, logic, control flow, systems theory... Having this urge, diving deeper into mathematical concepts once you need them doesn't feel like a burden. I don't even have my A-levels, so I'm probably as far from a phd as you'll find on HN, but that wouldn't stop me from exploring, from learning, from progress. Sorry if that was too personal and too much text, I just felt like I'm in the rare position to be able to answer something in depth on HN :-) [1] https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub#talks https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub#talks Some more links that I used: Functor, aplicative, and monad: https://typeslogicscats.gitlab.io/posts/functor-applicative-monad.html https://typeslogicscats.gitlab.io/posts/functor-applicative-... Category theory for programmers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8LbkfSSR58&list=PLbgaMIhjbmEnaH_LTkxLI7FMa2HsnawM_ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8LbkfSSR58&list=PLbgaMIhjbm...