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Did Functional Programming Get It Wrong (Part 2) – Minecraft-Style Crafting

24 points by reinman 4y ago

throwyourbote 4y ago
I read this - and I think there might have been some interesting points and ideas in there, but the whole article is way too unfocused to start considering them. I first I thought the whole thing was generated by GPT-3. Perhaps there is some language barrier, but this article needs to be heavily edited: at least 50% should be cut. Remove all the strawman attacks - they just make you sound weird, and makes the article very confusing (not the content, the structure). You obviously feel strongly about them, but the writing is not good enough to make them readable. For example, random sentences like "The good news is that math doesn’t really care what some Australians or overpaid programmers at Big Tech think."... There's no context for this, so I don't even know what are you even talking about. I'm guessing you're being clever - but I can't agree or disagree with you, because without context it has no meaning. I don't even know who or what you are talking about at all. Get rid of the strawmen and the personal/political rants. Even when well written, they are boring. Don't tell me why other people suck, show me why your ideas are good. Stop trying to be clever, and just tell me your ideas!
- reinman 4y ago
  I appreciate the feedback - it's a follow up to Part 1 for completeness, I don't expect anyone here to read it. Bombastic articles get attention but yes I need to tone it down. I don't think anyone cares about the FP cat fights anymore anyway You bring up an important preface that I forgot to add - thank you. Yes it does seem like I am jumping around and categories have a nasty pedagogical reputation because of how the brain is wired. Categories are a convergent tech but the human brain wants to compartmentalize, so this paper is literally pushing the opposite way we normally process information
  - schme 4y ago
    To be fair I would have read it, but there was no link, as another comments have pointed out as well.
    - reinman 4y ago
      It was mostly a troll article not worth reading - maybe there is a copy on wayback machine
- virtualritz 4y ago
  > For example, random sentences like "The good news is that math doesn’t really care what some Australians or overpaid programmers at Big Tech think."... There's no context for this, [...] To me this is funny/entertaining w/o taking focus off the topic. It is the kind of humor you will find in the UK and northern Europe. Dry, and has at least one level of indirection. I.e. not someone tripping over something and you hear a laughing track dubbed over that – in case you missed that was meant to be funny. I generally like when a text about a mentally taxing topic is lightly interspersed with such digressions. Most of my American friends don't grok them and not seldomly react like you – they consider these rants and not funny.
  - bspammer 4y ago
    Weird, the example you quoted feels American to me. British comedy tends to be self deprecating, whereas the article constantly takes the position of “I am the smart one, everyone else is doing it wrong” FWIW I’m not criticising, I enjoyed some of the ideas and they may well be correct.
    - reinman 4y ago
      I removed the jabs at the Aussies - that is dirty laundry I really don't need to be bringing up here as no one cares anymore
  - reinman 4y ago
    Yeah the west coast doesn't do humor anymore. I lived in San Francisco / Seattle years ago but I avoid all that now. They take offense at everything so everyone frowns in the stores. Coming from Eastern Europe, I recognize the creepy Soviet vibe and this is reflected in the pretty nauseating HN community Miami is WAAAY cooler Enjoy this article before it gets pulled
- brobinson 4y ago
  >For example, random sentences like "The good news is that math doesn’t really care what some Australians or overpaid programmers at Big Tech think."... There's no context for this, https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/07/prime-minister-says-the-laws-of-australia-can-beat-the-laws-of-math/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/07/prime-minister-says-the-l...
  - reinman 4y ago
    It was a poke at a very smart but also very annoying FP troll @dibblego For a while, FP noobs were terrorized by a bunch of FP thugs on Twitter
bigbacaloa 4y ago
Incoherent misuse of the language of category theory. No one will buy in if the argument is not communicated clearly.
- reinman 4y ago
  Funny how the same people that expect YOU to learn a bunch of arcane FP terminology suddenly demand that everything is explained to them in kindergarten terms Perhaps the greatest irony of FP BTW academic CT researchers are brilliant but usually aren't programmers But the hate is warranted. Any new tech needs to be able to stand up to criticism
  - garethrowlands 4y ago
    I think the author of the post you're replying likely understands category theory terminology and is arguing that the article misuses it and is incoherent. Functional programming theory has relied heavily on category theory ever since functional programs needed to do IO (around the late 90s), so it's fairly common for programmers to understand some basic category theory these days. After all, many things in programming aren't mathematical functions, so if programmers want invariants, then they do indeed need more mathematical objects than lambda calculus supplies. A better attack on functional programmers would be that they cargo cult category theory - but I don't think the article author is in a position to make that argument.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  I read commutated ..
pif 4y ago
When the title of an article is "Something Part 2", the first thing I expect to find on the page is the link to "Something Part 1". Whoever missed this connection, I don't trust him to talk about software.
- torginus 4y ago
  The weird thing is if you click on the author's name to view his other articles, it's not there either.
  - reinman 4y ago
    Yeah I don't support Medium anymore. If you are a programmer not an academic I would suggest you play w real software https://portal.multix.catatonic.ai/ https://portal.multix.catatonic.ai/
    - realo 4y ago
      Hum… I _did_ go there and got transported into something straight out of the 90’s , made by a 16-year old boy. Did not find part 1 of the article, though. Sorry.
      - reinman 4y ago
        Awesome retro dialup modem yes but this stuff goes much further back than 1990s Actually 1960s
    - brobinson 4y ago
      Hey, this is wild. Ignore the hater/ad hominem in the sibling comment. This is really cool stuff. Love the design and aesthetic.
      - reinman 4y ago
        Sending the love back ! When I first learned this cat stuff I was a TOP hater so everyone giving me grief is just well deserved karma coming back to haunt me
triska 4y ago
I liked this part about thinking of your codebase as a database: "Now close your eyes and imagine your codebase like a database - some imaginary glowing network floating in cyberspace - and then imagine your ‘program’ as a ‘query’ of sorts that zaps around this network." This is similar to what you get with logic programming languages like Prolog: A Prolog program is itself like a database, in that you define facts and rules that you can use to define the relations you want to express, and which themselves can also be readily inspected and reasoned about with the same mechanism. For example, we can define the predicate member/2 to state under what conditions an element occurs in a list: member(E, [E|_]). member(E, [_|Es]) :- member(E, Es). And then we can use the relation to ask queries about what is true: ?- member(X, "abc"). X = a ; X = b ; X = c ; false. And we can also inspect the definition itself, using clause/2: ?- clause(member(A, B), Body). B = [A|_A], Body = true ; B = [_A|_B], Body = member(A,_B). This ability to readily reason about the code itself is very attractive to analyze and rewrite the code. I also like the premise of the article: "Software complexity is starting to outpace the human ability to keep track of things." And indeed: There is hope that several kinds of problems we are facing today can be avoided if we are able to more easily reason about the code itself. For example, by running the code "hypothetically" and analyzing its consequences, we may be able to automatically detect certain classes of errors and failures before they happen in practice. For instance, I often think about software problems such as those described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal, and wonder: Can they be avoided by analyzing the software itself in better ways, and by writing it in such a way that we become able to "ask" the program itself: "Can such a problematic case even arise in practice?" Thus, in analogy to querying a database, we could pose and resolve questions about computations and their logical consequences.
- reinman 4y ago
  Exactly my thesis. Every programmer should be using an inference / crafting system by now in their daily tasks
uxcolumbo 4y ago
@reinman Can you share part 1? It doesn't seem to exist on your site.
- reinman 4y ago
  I no longer keep things on Medium as I don't support them anymore. I'm sure there is a copy on wayback machine perhaps
  - Rerarom 4y ago
    Here it is http://web.archive.org/web/20190425125010/https://medium.com/@reinman/monoids-to-groupoids-492c35105113 http://web.archive.org/web/20190425125010/https://medium.com...
    - reinman 4y ago
      There you go. Mostly false premise to false conclusion because FP itself has a bunch of issues. Mathematically speaking, a lot of FP is analogous to building a relational query but wiring the joins manually each time. A bit tedious perhaps
  - uxcolumbo 4y ago
    For your readers it might be a good idea to include part 1 on your new blog - to provide some context. Otherwise it might be confusing to call it part 2 - as people will then think 'Ok, where is part 1?'
ebingdom 4y ago
This article is completely incongruous and reveals fundamental misunderstandings of category theory. That's actually being generous; most of the content isn't even coherent enough to be wrong. > Category Theory (at least applied to computing) studies how instructions are assembled into running programs. Um, no? As a software engineer who has studied category theory, I use it mostly for denotational reasoning about programs, and to inform type-level decisions. It has nothing to do with "instructions". Perhaps a generous interpretation of this statement would be that monads, one very specific concept in category theory, can be used to model imperative programs—but that would be highly reductionist. > That’s not to say that FP is useless. FP is obviously quite useful in many situations - but perhaps not be enough to displace the central role of wrapper functions / lambda calculus. What? Functional programming _is_ lambda calculus. The idea of it displacing lambda calculus makes no sense. > Why? Mathematically speaking, Category Theory is basically the same as Relational Theory (at least applied to Sets). Oof. Rel is one category; Set is another. > There is this fanciful notion of a “computational trinity”- the idea is that devs can somehow write to a single source of “truth” and let artificial intelligence / automation decide how it gets translated to hardware. No, the trinity refers to the connections between category theory, logic, and programming. It has nothing to do with AI. Was this article written by an AI?
- reinman 4y ago
  Categories are chains of morphisms If you don't get that, maybe you missed something in your training And yes it has everything to do with AI (not categories per se but the article)
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    > it has everything to do with AI Could you elaborate on this? What does it have to do with AI?
    - reinman 4y ago
      Do you have any Prolog background? Inference rules? Armstrong's axioms etc.?
xupybd 4y ago
I have looked into category theory a bit and admit I have a lot to learn. Nothing in this article made sense to me. I'm not sure if that reflects the article or my own intelligence. In either case these ideas need better explanation if they want average developers like me onboard. What I like about FP is that I can reason about the program in my head. Especially with F#'s strong type system. Often I can sit down and plan a simple system just by writing down the types I need to represent my domain. Then I can write down the function signatures/types for the actions I need to get my program working. Then it's like painting by numbers to fill out the function bodies. This crafting thing sounds like copilot on steroids. Copilot is amazing but is also unreliable. I'm not sure how on earth this is all going to be reliable. It also sounds like it would be harder for me to understand what is going on. To me that's a step backwards. My brain is fried trying to understand that article. I'm seriously confused.
- reinman 4y ago
  Not co-pilot, but dependent types on steroids. Multi-dimensional dependent types to be more precise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iKwq9iRHWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iKwq9iRHWk But that's why I boiled things down to Minecraft style crafting. Mainstream programmers don't have time to learn category theory or dependent type theory etc. ... or even care. The Lambda Conference stuff caters to a small group of programmers that are already happy with FP etc. for whatever they are doing (usually program verification, not mainstream coding) There is a notion of "categorical thinking" where you try to free your brain from the urge to compartmentalize. Imagine the smartphone example
thebeastie 4y ago
I personally am curious to find out if what you are doing might amount to a generally useful paradigm, but you’re understandably getting some criticism because your work seems a little unconcerned about connecting with the rest of the world, and there appear to be things like personality and hubris at play. I watched your video “farting around” and saw the mini language and the different terminals, but I still have no idea how that plus all the rhetoric in your blog post amount to something that people might want to use to solve real problems. Have you just connected up a bunch of concepts in your head and assumed that they are world changing? Would you be able to write documentation and examples explaining how people might use these concepts to solve actual problems? It takes a certain kind of person, independently minded, to go so far down a rabbit hole and not care what people invested in the status quo (the overwhelming majority in tech) might think. And, since I’m also prone to this “style” of working, and also aware of how it interplays with personality, I’ve thought about it quite a bit, and my conclusion is that it’s potentially high reward in terms of innovation but it’s also high risk in terms of actually amounting to something. It’s hard in tech, because if you were a visual artist your style of work would be rewarded as interesting and provocative but in tech it all has to make some kind of sense and guh can’t have any fun god forbid… it’s almost like we’ve been brainwashed… there’s not a lot of room for concept art in technical architecture (unfortunately).
- reinman 4y ago
  Any new tech deserves well-deserved criticism imo. It's the only way for devs to judge noise for signal One real world example I am doing for a large customer is data integration across 10-20 large databases and APIs. Categories are ideal for this because they give you the adhoc interactivity of what you would get with SQL but when I am dealing with a bunch of different vendor databases, SQL is not an option. Plus I need to join against APIs and would rather use Typescript for that A simple example of "crafting" is to resolve the database "connection" parameter to a routine. The problem with working w databases is that every query expects you to have established a connection first - and the minute you make a code change, you lose your database connection(s). This gets much harder when dealing with joins across 10-20 databases at the same time Then what do you do w the results? Well, you probably want to cache them. This is where persistent memory comes in My DB query results - regardless of the database - are usually a Typescript array - and I am not about to stuff them into another database. But I don't want to lose the array from memory every time I make a code change either. Persistent memory is a good place to stuff that array
PhillyG 4y ago
Minecraft has a couple of different ways that crafting is done: 1) the original way where you have a grid that you can put items/crafting materials on. If you put particular materials on the grid in the pattern for an item, it will give you the option of taking that item at the expense of the ingrediants 2) when they ported to consoles, they made it with a recipe book, where you choose what you want to make and creation just happens if you can - no need to remember patterns, no need to move items into the pattern. The recipe book shows things that you have some of the ingredients of, and has colour coded backgrounds for all the ingredients or just some. Either way you craft things that the game already knows about. Building things in the world is different - you just place blocks or items where you want them. I'm not sure how that relates to programming. I can't say I really understood the article.
- reinman 4y ago
  The type system is where the "cookbook" lives So in a way, if you go through all the work of setting that up you should be rewarded with some sort of crafting. After all, the type checker is kinda doing some of that work anyway
  - reinman 4y ago
    So there is quite a stir about dependent types in academia these days Remember that coming up w the names for types is half the battle. Whether something is a "string" or an "Address" or an "InputField" is really a multi-dimensional type problem
xyzzy4747 4y ago
It would help if this article gave some examples of the superior coding style that doesn’t use functions. I would be very curious what it would look like or how it would be bug free. Would it use lots of goto statements like the early computing days? I have to say I don’t entirely understand this article.
- reinman 4y ago
  For example, in Multix the browser can issue a crafting request for page contents The fact the HTML might sit on a remote server is a crafting detail left to the categorical machine I have some examples on Twitter
  - reinman 4y ago
    The server in turn may need to issue crafting requests to load stuff from disk The nice thing about crafting is that stuff gets cached in inventory as a side effect. You can toss inventory as a way to clear the cache
throwaway894323 4y ago
We are going to continue to see NullPointerException and nil panic's as people continue to use languages like Go and Java with conservative type systems. My point is people don't care about these issues and just want to ship code. At least Go is kind of enough to add good error messages.
- reinman 4y ago
  yes - the industry is so scattered that FP tends to attract a niche solving very specific problems such as program verification And those concerned with speed on hardware are probably not the ones who want the flexibility and interactivity of high level languages
Ideabile 4y ago
This article just make me feel stupid, which probably I am. The only pragmatic argument that I could understand is the hard-wiring “issue”; which IMO is not part of FP and neither OOP but just a consequence that explicit intents are simpler than implicit intents. I understand that this is to introduce to a novelty approach that Multix offers with cats. But to be fair, not as sofisticate as Multix, Dependency Injection tries to tackle the hard-wiring constraints of imperative. What I take from FP is Composition rather than Chaining, which much more flexible than the OOP counterpart, inheritance. I was expecting to learn something new but I just jump in a spooky vocabulary that rather teach me something just waste my time. The point stand, Multix might be a fabulous approach in coding, but this article failed to give any practical introduction to it, while claiming his superiority in something that totally didn’t resonate with me. If your mission is getting Multix adopters I will invite you to shift your focus from language/tone/academical complexity; to something more simple, what does it solve?
- reinman 4y ago
  Good points. See my enterprise data integration example below Cats kinda live between trad code and databases, so they are really good at integration across systems. Zapier and other no-code approaches are nice but don't go deep enough and eventually you hit a wall. So cats are the "next level" down from such systems without having to abandon such tools entirely and go back to the old ways
  - reinman 4y ago
    Crafting is particularly useful in testing For example, suppose you just need to isolate and test a function but you won't want to manually write a test harness A crafting system could build the upstream dependencies and then deliver you the results - no code changes needed
    - reinman 4y ago
      Yes anything that says "Functional Programming" in the title tends to attract a certain type of developer tackling a certain type of problem, usually program verification etc. Not mainstream programming for sure
fedeb95 4y ago
it got my interest, but not all the world can get the Silicon Valleys references you make. Maybe it's better to keep it on the technical side

24 points by reinman 4y ago

I read this - and I think there might have been some interesting points and ideas in there, but the whole article is way too unfocused to start considering them. I first I thought the whole thing was generated by GPT-3. Perhaps there is some language barrier, but this article needs to be heavily edited: at least 50% should be cut. Remove all the strawman attacks - they just make you sound weird, and makes the article very confusing (not the content, the structure). You obviously feel strongly about them, but the writing is not good enough to make them readable. For example, random sentences like "The good news is that math doesn’t really care what some Australians or overpaid programmers at Big Tech think."... There's no context for this, so I don't even know what are you even talking about. I'm guessing you're being clever - but I can't agree or disagree with you, because without context it has no meaning. I don't even know who or what you are talking about at all. Get rid of the strawmen and the personal/political rants. Even when well written, they are boring. Don't tell me why other people suck, show me why your ideas are good. Stop trying to be clever, and just tell me your ideas!

reinman 4y ago
I appreciate the feedback - it's a follow up to Part 1 for completeness, I don't expect anyone here to read it. Bombastic articles get attention but yes I need to tone it down. I don't think anyone cares about the FP cat fights anymore anyway You bring up an important preface that I forgot to add - thank you. Yes it does seem like I am jumping around and categories have a nasty pedagogical reputation because of how the brain is wired. Categories are a convergent tech but the human brain wants to compartmentalize, so this paper is literally pushing the opposite way we normally process information
- schme 4y ago
  To be fair I would have read it, but there was no link, as another comments have pointed out as well.
  - reinman 4y ago
    It was mostly a troll article not worth reading - maybe there is a copy on wayback machine
virtualritz 4y ago
> For example, random sentences like "The good news is that math doesn’t really care what some Australians or overpaid programmers at Big Tech think."... There's no context for this, [...] To me this is funny/entertaining w/o taking focus off the topic. It is the kind of humor you will find in the UK and northern Europe. Dry, and has at least one level of indirection. I.e. not someone tripping over something and you hear a laughing track dubbed over that – in case you missed that was meant to be funny. I generally like when a text about a mentally taxing topic is lightly interspersed with such digressions. Most of my American friends don't grok them and not seldomly react like you – they consider these rants and not funny.
- bspammer 4y ago
  Weird, the example you quoted feels American to me. British comedy tends to be self deprecating, whereas the article constantly takes the position of “I am the smart one, everyone else is doing it wrong” FWIW I’m not criticising, I enjoyed some of the ideas and they may well be correct.
  - reinman 4y ago
    I removed the jabs at the Aussies - that is dirty laundry I really don't need to be bringing up here as no one cares anymore
- reinman 4y ago
  Yeah the west coast doesn't do humor anymore. I lived in San Francisco / Seattle years ago but I avoid all that now. They take offense at everything so everyone frowns in the stores. Coming from Eastern Europe, I recognize the creepy Soviet vibe and this is reflected in the pretty nauseating HN community Miami is WAAAY cooler Enjoy this article before it gets pulled
brobinson 4y ago
>For example, random sentences like "The good news is that math doesn’t really care what some Australians or overpaid programmers at Big Tech think."... There's no context for this, https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/07/prime-minister-says-the-laws-of-australia-can-beat-the-laws-of-math/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/07/prime-minister-says-the-l...
- reinman 4y ago
  It was a poke at a very smart but also very annoying FP troll @dibblego For a while, FP noobs were terrorized by a bunch of FP thugs on Twitter

bigbacaloa 4y ago

Incoherent misuse of the language of category theory. No one will buy in if the argument is not communicated clearly.

reinman 4y ago
Funny how the same people that expect YOU to learn a bunch of arcane FP terminology suddenly demand that everything is explained to them in kindergarten terms Perhaps the greatest irony of FP BTW academic CT researchers are brilliant but usually aren't programmers But the hate is warranted. Any new tech needs to be able to stand up to criticism
- garethrowlands 4y ago
  I think the author of the post you're replying likely understands category theory terminology and is arguing that the article misuses it and is incoherent. Functional programming theory has relied heavily on category theory ever since functional programs needed to do IO (around the late 90s), so it's fairly common for programmers to understand some basic category theory these days. After all, many things in programming aren't mathematical functions, so if programmers want invariants, then they do indeed need more mathematical objects than lambda calculus supplies. A better attack on functional programmers would be that they cargo cult category theory - but I don't think the article author is in a position to make that argument.
agumonkey 4y ago
I read commutated ..

pif 4y ago

When the title of an article is "Something Part 2", the first thing I expect to find on the page is the link to "Something Part 1". Whoever missed this connection, I don't trust him to talk about software.

torginus 4y ago
The weird thing is if you click on the author's name to view his other articles, it's not there either.
- reinman 4y ago
  Yeah I don't support Medium anymore. If you are a programmer not an academic I would suggest you play w real software https://portal.multix.catatonic.ai/ https://portal.multix.catatonic.ai/
  - realo 4y ago
    Hum… I _did_ go there and got transported into something straight out of the 90’s , made by a 16-year old boy. Did not find part 1 of the article, though. Sorry.
    - reinman 4y ago
      Awesome retro dialup modem yes but this stuff goes much further back than 1990s Actually 1960s
  - brobinson 4y ago
    Hey, this is wild. Ignore the hater/ad hominem in the sibling comment. This is really cool stuff. Love the design and aesthetic.
    - reinman 4y ago
      Sending the love back ! When I first learned this cat stuff I was a TOP hater so everyone giving me grief is just well deserved karma coming back to haunt me

triska 4y ago

I liked this part about thinking of your codebase as a database: "Now close your eyes and imagine your codebase like a database - some imaginary glowing network floating in cyberspace - and then imagine your ‘program’ as a ‘query’ of sorts that zaps around this network." This is similar to what you get with logic programming languages like Prolog: A Prolog program is itself like a database, in that you define facts and rules that you can use to define the relations you want to express, and which themselves can also be readily inspected and reasoned about with the same mechanism. For example, we can define the predicate member/2 to state under what conditions an element occurs in a list: member(E, [E|_]). member(E, [_|Es]) :- member(E, Es). And then we can use the relation to ask queries about what is true: ?- member(X, "abc"). X = a ; X = b ; X = c ; false. And we can also inspect the definition itself, using clause/2: ?- clause(member(A, B), Body). B = [A|_A], Body = true ; B = [_A|_B], Body = member(A,_B). This ability to readily reason about the code itself is very attractive to analyze and rewrite the code. I also like the premise of the article: "Software complexity is starting to outpace the human ability to keep track of things." And indeed: There is hope that several kinds of problems we are facing today can be avoided if we are able to more easily reason about the code itself. For example, by running the code "hypothetically" and analyzing its consequences, we may be able to automatically detect certain classes of errors and failures before they happen in practice. For instance, I often think about software problems such as those described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal, and wonder: Can they be avoided by analyzing the software itself in better ways, and by writing it in such a way that we become able to "ask" the program itself: "Can such a problematic case even arise in practice?" Thus, in analogy to querying a database, we could pose and resolve questions about computations and their logical consequences.

reinman 4y ago
Exactly my thesis. Every programmer should be using an inference / crafting system by now in their daily tasks

uxcolumbo 4y ago

@reinman Can you share part 1? It doesn't seem to exist on your site.

reinman 4y ago
I no longer keep things on Medium as I don't support them anymore. I'm sure there is a copy on wayback machine perhaps
- Rerarom 4y ago
  Here it is http://web.archive.org/web/20190425125010/https://medium.com/@reinman/monoids-to-groupoids-492c35105113 http://web.archive.org/web/20190425125010/https://medium.com...
  - reinman 4y ago
    There you go. Mostly false premise to false conclusion because FP itself has a bunch of issues. Mathematically speaking, a lot of FP is analogous to building a relational query but wiring the joins manually each time. A bit tedious perhaps
- uxcolumbo 4y ago
  For your readers it might be a good idea to include part 1 on your new blog - to provide some context. Otherwise it might be confusing to call it part 2 - as people will then think 'Ok, where is part 1?'

ebingdom 4y ago

This article is completely incongruous and reveals fundamental misunderstandings of category theory. That's actually being generous; most of the content isn't even coherent enough to be wrong. > Category Theory (at least applied to computing) studies how instructions are assembled into running programs. Um, no? As a software engineer who has studied category theory, I use it mostly for denotational reasoning about programs, and to inform type-level decisions. It has nothing to do with "instructions". Perhaps a generous interpretation of this statement would be that monads, one very specific concept in category theory, can be used to model imperative programs—but that would be highly reductionist. > That’s not to say that FP is useless. FP is obviously quite useful in many situations - but perhaps not be enough to displace the central role of wrapper functions / lambda calculus. What? Functional programming _is_ lambda calculus. The idea of it displacing lambda calculus makes no sense. > Why? Mathematically speaking, Category Theory is basically the same as Relational Theory (at least applied to Sets). Oof. Rel is one category; Set is another. > There is this fanciful notion of a “computational trinity”- the idea is that devs can somehow write to a single source of “truth” and let artificial intelligence / automation decide how it gets translated to hardware. No, the trinity refers to the connections between category theory, logic, and programming. It has nothing to do with AI. Was this article written by an AI?

reinman 4y ago
Categories are chains of morphisms If you don't get that, maybe you missed something in your training And yes it has everything to do with AI (not categories per se but the article)
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  > it has everything to do with AI Could you elaborate on this? What does it have to do with AI?
  - reinman 4y ago
    Do you have any Prolog background? Inference rules? Armstrong's axioms etc.?

xupybd 4y ago

I have looked into category theory a bit and admit I have a lot to learn. Nothing in this article made sense to me. I'm not sure if that reflects the article or my own intelligence. In either case these ideas need better explanation if they want average developers like me onboard. What I like about FP is that I can reason about the program in my head. Especially with F#'s strong type system. Often I can sit down and plan a simple system just by writing down the types I need to represent my domain. Then I can write down the function signatures/types for the actions I need to get my program working. Then it's like painting by numbers to fill out the function bodies. This crafting thing sounds like copilot on steroids. Copilot is amazing but is also unreliable. I'm not sure how on earth this is all going to be reliable. It also sounds like it would be harder for me to understand what is going on. To me that's a step backwards. My brain is fried trying to understand that article. I'm seriously confused.

reinman 4y ago
Not co-pilot, but dependent types on steroids. Multi-dimensional dependent types to be more precise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iKwq9iRHWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iKwq9iRHWk But that's why I boiled things down to Minecraft style crafting. Mainstream programmers don't have time to learn category theory or dependent type theory etc. ... or even care. The Lambda Conference stuff caters to a small group of programmers that are already happy with FP etc. for whatever they are doing (usually program verification, not mainstream coding) There is a notion of "categorical thinking" where you try to free your brain from the urge to compartmentalize. Imagine the smartphone example

thebeastie 4y ago

I personally am curious to find out if what you are doing might amount to a generally useful paradigm, but you’re understandably getting some criticism because your work seems a little unconcerned about connecting with the rest of the world, and there appear to be things like personality and hubris at play. I watched your video “farting around” and saw the mini language and the different terminals, but I still have no idea how that plus all the rhetoric in your blog post amount to something that people might want to use to solve real problems. Have you just connected up a bunch of concepts in your head and assumed that they are world changing? Would you be able to write documentation and examples explaining how people might use these concepts to solve actual problems? It takes a certain kind of person, independently minded, to go so far down a rabbit hole and not care what people invested in the status quo (the overwhelming majority in tech) might think. And, since I’m also prone to this “style” of working, and also aware of how it interplays with personality, I’ve thought about it quite a bit, and my conclusion is that it’s potentially high reward in terms of innovation but it’s also high risk in terms of actually amounting to something. It’s hard in tech, because if you were a visual artist your style of work would be rewarded as interesting and provocative but in tech it all has to make some kind of sense and guh can’t have any fun god forbid… it’s almost like we’ve been brainwashed… there’s not a lot of room for concept art in technical architecture (unfortunately).

reinman 4y ago
Any new tech deserves well-deserved criticism imo. It's the only way for devs to judge noise for signal One real world example I am doing for a large customer is data integration across 10-20 large databases and APIs. Categories are ideal for this because they give you the adhoc interactivity of what you would get with SQL but when I am dealing with a bunch of different vendor databases, SQL is not an option. Plus I need to join against APIs and would rather use Typescript for that A simple example of "crafting" is to resolve the database "connection" parameter to a routine. The problem with working w databases is that every query expects you to have established a connection first - and the minute you make a code change, you lose your database connection(s). This gets much harder when dealing with joins across 10-20 databases at the same time Then what do you do w the results? Well, you probably want to cache them. This is where persistent memory comes in My DB query results - regardless of the database - are usually a Typescript array - and I am not about to stuff them into another database. But I don't want to lose the array from memory every time I make a code change either. Persistent memory is a good place to stuff that array

PhillyG 4y ago

Minecraft has a couple of different ways that crafting is done: 1) the original way where you have a grid that you can put items/crafting materials on. If you put particular materials on the grid in the pattern for an item, it will give you the option of taking that item at the expense of the ingrediants 2) when they ported to consoles, they made it with a recipe book, where you choose what you want to make and creation just happens if you can - no need to remember patterns, no need to move items into the pattern. The recipe book shows things that you have some of the ingredients of, and has colour coded backgrounds for all the ingredients or just some. Either way you craft things that the game already knows about. Building things in the world is different - you just place blocks or items where you want them. I'm not sure how that relates to programming. I can't say I really understood the article.

reinman 4y ago
The type system is where the "cookbook" lives So in a way, if you go through all the work of setting that up you should be rewarded with some sort of crafting. After all, the type checker is kinda doing some of that work anyway
- reinman 4y ago
  So there is quite a stir about dependent types in academia these days Remember that coming up w the names for types is half the battle. Whether something is a "string" or an "Address" or an "InputField" is really a multi-dimensional type problem

xyzzy4747 4y ago

It would help if this article gave some examples of the superior coding style that doesn’t use functions. I would be very curious what it would look like or how it would be bug free. Would it use lots of goto statements like the early computing days? I have to say I don’t entirely understand this article.

reinman 4y ago
For example, in Multix the browser can issue a crafting request for page contents The fact the HTML might sit on a remote server is a crafting detail left to the categorical machine I have some examples on Twitter
- reinman 4y ago
  The server in turn may need to issue crafting requests to load stuff from disk The nice thing about crafting is that stuff gets cached in inventory as a side effect. You can toss inventory as a way to clear the cache

throwaway894323 4y ago

We are going to continue to see NullPointerException and nil panic's as people continue to use languages like Go and Java with conservative type systems. My point is people don't care about these issues and just want to ship code. At least Go is kind of enough to add good error messages.

reinman 4y ago
yes - the industry is so scattered that FP tends to attract a niche solving very specific problems such as program verification And those concerned with speed on hardware are probably not the ones who want the flexibility and interactivity of high level languages

Ideabile 4y ago

This article just make me feel stupid, which probably I am. The only pragmatic argument that I could understand is the hard-wiring “issue”; which IMO is not part of FP and neither OOP but just a consequence that explicit intents are simpler than implicit intents. I understand that this is to introduce to a novelty approach that Multix offers with cats. But to be fair, not as sofisticate as Multix, Dependency Injection tries to tackle the hard-wiring constraints of imperative. What I take from FP is Composition rather than Chaining, which much more flexible than the OOP counterpart, inheritance. I was expecting to learn something new but I just jump in a spooky vocabulary that rather teach me something just waste my time. The point stand, Multix might be a fabulous approach in coding, but this article failed to give any practical introduction to it, while claiming his superiority in something that totally didn’t resonate with me. If your mission is getting Multix adopters I will invite you to shift your focus from language/tone/academical complexity; to something more simple, what does it solve?

reinman 4y ago
Good points. See my enterprise data integration example below Cats kinda live between trad code and databases, so they are really good at integration across systems. Zapier and other no-code approaches are nice but don't go deep enough and eventually you hit a wall. So cats are the "next level" down from such systems without having to abandon such tools entirely and go back to the old ways
- reinman 4y ago
  Crafting is particularly useful in testing For example, suppose you just need to isolate and test a function but you won't want to manually write a test harness A crafting system could build the upstream dependencies and then deliver you the results - no code changes needed
  - reinman 4y ago
    Yes anything that says "Functional Programming" in the title tends to attract a certain type of developer tackling a certain type of problem, usually program verification etc. Not mainstream programming for sure

fedeb95 4y ago

it got my interest, but not all the world can get the Silicon Valleys references you make. Maybe it's better to keep it on the technical side