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I agree with you. CT seems mostly useful as a way of devising entirely new abstractions, but once those abstractions are developed, you don't need CT to use th

I agree with you. CT seems mostly useful as a way of devising entirely new abstractions, but once those abstractions are developed, you don't need CT to use them. For example if it were 2008 and you want to be inventor Applicative functors for use in Haskell, then knowing lax monoidal functors from CT might be helpful. But if you want to just use Applicative functors, you don't need to learn lax monoidal functors first. So programmers probably don't need to learn CT because they can just let the computer scientists devise their abstractions for them. But if you want to be a computer scientist and one day devise your own abstractions[0], then maybe CT would be helpful. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33805923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33805923

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
Do you have any recommended reading for learning CT from the perspective of an engineer who does want to make their own abstractions? Your description is the single best sales pitch for learning it that I've ever heard. I'm legitimately interested now — in a way that I simply wasn't before your comment. Everyone else who tries to hype up CT is always like, "Whoa, bro, don't you know that addition is actually a monoid endofunctor over the set of all hyper-reals?" (Or something.) I guess that sort of breathless mathematical revelation is supposed to be so mind-blowing that anyone who hears it gets instantly hooked. My usual response was always just, "So what?" But you're telling me I can become a better engineer? A meta-engineer, who can engineer things to engineer with? Yeah, I'd definitely be up for that.
- larve 4y ago
  (author here) I found the corecursive podcast episode about "portal abstractions" with sam ritchie quite inspiring. It's about monoids from the algebraic point of view, but the mindset is very similar, I think. https://corecursive.com/050-sam-ritchie-portal-abstractions-2/ https://corecursive.com/050-sam-ritchie-portal-abstractions-... I think I might have linked it in the article.
- rssoconnor 4y ago
  My method was to spend 25 years listening to colleagues mumble about Category Theory and slowly picking up the basics. Even I didn't really use Category Theory in my abstraction work. It's just that after months of effort to crack my problem, I showed my pages of work to the Category Theory folks and they were like "oh, it's simply Yoneda this and Yoneda that and your proof can be done in 4 lines.". That said, if I had to guess at what would be effective at getting up to speed without spending 25 years, would be to checkout https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf Category Theory for Programmers. Milewski was one of those people who were like "Oh, it's simply Yoneda this and Yoneda that", and he figured it out all himself in parallel without seeing my proof. But I doubt it will be like, knowing Category Theory will enable you to have super powers for abstraction design. Rather it will be a matter of having enough mathematical tools at your disposal plus the right inspiration at the right time to realize that ones of those tools can happen to solve your abstraction programming problem you happen to be facing at some moment, in a way that is not obvious, if you are lucky. In fact, you likely have to first guess at what the right abstraction is and then fall back on Category Theory to verify the sanity of your guess.
- sargstuff 4y ago
  Well, will wind up being less tensor than peers to point of being tagged as tuple when you walk in; but still 'All about the blocks' and cache on hand. Independent of mathematical numerical systems used, everthing gets loaded at hoursX0000. Everything else after that is just bracket arrangements. If let things stack up, then it's all about what can be accomplished before zeroing out. https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-programmers-the-preface/ https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-p... https://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp18/7Sketches.pdf https://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp18/7Sketches.pdf

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago

Do you have any recommended reading for learning CT from the perspective of an engineer who does want to make their own abstractions? Your description is the single best sales pitch for learning it that I've ever heard. I'm legitimately interested now — in a way that I simply wasn't before your comment. Everyone else who tries to hype up CT is always like, "Whoa, bro, don't you know that addition is actually a monoid endofunctor over the set of all hyper-reals?" (Or something.) I guess that sort of breathless mathematical revelation is supposed to be so mind-blowing that anyone who hears it gets instantly hooked. My usual response was always just, "So what?" But you're telling me I can become a better engineer? A meta-engineer, who can engineer things to engineer with? Yeah, I'd definitely be up for that.

larve 4y ago
(author here) I found the corecursive podcast episode about "portal abstractions" with sam ritchie quite inspiring. It's about monoids from the algebraic point of view, but the mindset is very similar, I think. https://corecursive.com/050-sam-ritchie-portal-abstractions-2/ https://corecursive.com/050-sam-ritchie-portal-abstractions-... I think I might have linked it in the article.
rssoconnor 4y ago
My method was to spend 25 years listening to colleagues mumble about Category Theory and slowly picking up the basics. Even I didn't really use Category Theory in my abstraction work. It's just that after months of effort to crack my problem, I showed my pages of work to the Category Theory folks and they were like "oh, it's simply Yoneda this and Yoneda that and your proof can be done in 4 lines.". That said, if I had to guess at what would be effective at getting up to speed without spending 25 years, would be to checkout https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf Category Theory for Programmers. Milewski was one of those people who were like "Oh, it's simply Yoneda this and Yoneda that", and he figured it out all himself in parallel without seeing my proof. But I doubt it will be like, knowing Category Theory will enable you to have super powers for abstraction design. Rather it will be a matter of having enough mathematical tools at your disposal plus the right inspiration at the right time to realize that ones of those tools can happen to solve your abstraction programming problem you happen to be facing at some moment, in a way that is not obvious, if you are lucky. In fact, you likely have to first guess at what the right abstraction is and then fall back on Category Theory to verify the sanity of your guess.
sargstuff 4y ago
Well, will wind up being less tensor than peers to point of being tagged as tuple when you walk in; but still 'All about the blocks' and cache on hand. Independent of mathematical numerical systems used, everthing gets loaded at hoursX0000. Everything else after that is just bracket arrangements. If let things stack up, then it's all about what can be accomplished before zeroing out. https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-programmers-the-preface/ https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-p... https://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp18/7Sketches.pdf https://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp18/7Sketches.pdf