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You know, maybe the average HNer will not get 1ct of benefit from reading 1paper on category theory; but maybe they can get .1ct from reading .1paper. The func
by pavpanchekha 15y ago
You know, maybe the average HNer will not get 1ct of benefit from reading 1paper on category theory; but maybe they can get .1ct from reading .1paper. The functor pattern is pretty cool. It's easy to use in most languages (Java and C++ included), it's pretty powerful, maybe it gets people thinking a certain way. Maybe someone will read the first bit of this paper and think, "Huh, I heard monads are from category theory too. Don't know what those are, but the first 20 pages of this weren't too bad". Don't complain about people posting useless things; clearly someone voted for it.
Math isn't ever "useful". Math only generates more math. Math is measured in ideas inspired.
- xyzzyz 15y agoFunctor pattern is certainly something else than functor in category theory. By "useful" I mean "useful in getting new results or new, better proofs". By this metric, singular homology is certainly useful, because it enables us to create clean and elegant proofs of some highly non-trivial and interesting facts, but I cannot imagine anything more useless in real life.
- g__ 15y agoFunctor typeclass in Haskell models category-theoretic endofunctor rather well.
- xyzzyz 15y agoFunctor typeclass in Haskell is not what is usually meant by "functor pattern", e.g. the function object, something that "implements Runnable".
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- pavpanchekha 15y agoI had no idea the gang of four had appropriated that word too. My bad. I really did mean the category theory functor, not whatever its other meaning is. However useful or not category theory is for producing new proofs, I found it enlightening and am glad this was posted.