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> A lot of category theory is fun to learn and knowing it will help you in many ways I agree with your statement except that part. W.r.t coding, learning func

> A lot of category theory is fun to learn and knowing it will help you in many ways I agree with your statement except that part. W.r.t coding, learning functional programing will help you in many ways. Learning category theory will just allow you to say "ah I've seen that concept before" - but it won't really help much.

epgui 4y ago
The number of times I’ve heard someone say that some academic topic was not helpful and they were right is close to zero. It’s a pretty good heuristic to not adopt that attitude.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  This statement reads as really weird. You seem to be saying that your opinion and/or experience on the usefulness of academic topics is a good heuristic to use to not adopt an attitude.
  - pizza 4y ago
    Makes sense to me. People often attribute uselessness to that which their imagination struggles to engage. Note that OP didn’t say: “everything everyone else says is useless is useful” but rather “rushing to judge something useless is a very noisy predictor of actual uselessness”
  - epgui 4y ago
    Indeed you’re free to ignore my perspective, which is just what my comment offered… But this is something I’ve seen play out over and over and over again. It probably started all the way back in high school with people in the back of the class asking how all this high school maths would help them in real life. Then you get to university and people ask the same in just about every class. Then you get to industry and all the people who had that attitude growing up are calling you for help (and the people who still have that attitude seem to stop learning, or learn at much lower velocity). It’s always more obvious in hindsight, and particularly with maths: stuff always seems kinda useless before you deeply understand it. That’s unfortunate, because it severely hampers the motivation to learn the stuff in the first place… But it is what it is, I guess. Even pure mathematicians, who have every incentive to see their own work as immensely useful, are notorious for frequently having no idea just how useful and applicable their work will be in the future (albeit usually over longer time horizons). My experience is that this is even more true for cross-disciplinary applications, as either discipline naturally is unaware of the perspective of the other discipline. It’s true that it’s important/necessary to specialize deeply and narrowly, but the value of cross-disciplinary skills (especially regarding maths) is probably under-appreciated, IMO.
- BoiledCabbage 4y ago
  While that is a great general rule, everyday life isn't generalities, it's specific cases. Outside of game programming, topology isn't useful knowledge for software engineering. A clear exception to your rule above. Being an strict adherent to a heuristic and not examining the specifics of a situation is in my opinion a poor habit. Superficially pattern matching will lead people down the wrong path more often.
5n 4y ago
I've found that knowing categories to the extent that Haskell teaches them through osmosis is useful. For example, knowing functions are functors in the return type and cofunctors in the argument makes grasping co/contravariance in OO much easier. I haven't found any utility to the CT that is above the scope of Haskell; it feels like if it's too advanced to implement in Haskell, it's too advanced to find a use case anywhere.
deterministic 4y ago
Agree. I haven’t seen a single practical example of Category Theory being used to come up with a solution that was better than a solution not inferred from Category Theory.
feanaro 4y ago
You can pretty easily invert this principle in order to make it useful. When designing new systems, make it such that it mirrors that concept you've seen before. In making it such, you now know that certain properties will hold and the system will be easier to work with due to this, having less inelegant, sharp edges.

epgui 4y ago

The number of times I’ve heard someone say that some academic topic was not helpful and they were right is close to zero. It’s a pretty good heuristic to not adopt that attitude.

bcrosby95 4y ago
This statement reads as really weird. You seem to be saying that your opinion and/or experience on the usefulness of academic topics is a good heuristic to use to not adopt an attitude.
- pizza 4y ago
  Makes sense to me. People often attribute uselessness to that which their imagination struggles to engage. Note that OP didn’t say: “everything everyone else says is useless is useful” but rather “rushing to judge something useless is a very noisy predictor of actual uselessness”
- epgui 4y ago
  Indeed you’re free to ignore my perspective, which is just what my comment offered… But this is something I’ve seen play out over and over and over again. It probably started all the way back in high school with people in the back of the class asking how all this high school maths would help them in real life. Then you get to university and people ask the same in just about every class. Then you get to industry and all the people who had that attitude growing up are calling you for help (and the people who still have that attitude seem to stop learning, or learn at much lower velocity). It’s always more obvious in hindsight, and particularly with maths: stuff always seems kinda useless before you deeply understand it. That’s unfortunate, because it severely hampers the motivation to learn the stuff in the first place… But it is what it is, I guess. Even pure mathematicians, who have every incentive to see their own work as immensely useful, are notorious for frequently having no idea just how useful and applicable their work will be in the future (albeit usually over longer time horizons). My experience is that this is even more true for cross-disciplinary applications, as either discipline naturally is unaware of the perspective of the other discipline. It’s true that it’s important/necessary to specialize deeply and narrowly, but the value of cross-disciplinary skills (especially regarding maths) is probably under-appreciated, IMO.
BoiledCabbage 4y ago
While that is a great general rule, everyday life isn't generalities, it's specific cases. Outside of game programming, topology isn't useful knowledge for software engineering. A clear exception to your rule above. Being an strict adherent to a heuristic and not examining the specifics of a situation is in my opinion a poor habit. Superficially pattern matching will lead people down the wrong path more often.

5n 4y ago

I've found that knowing categories to the extent that Haskell teaches them through osmosis is useful. For example, knowing functions are functors in the return type and cofunctors in the argument makes grasping co/contravariance in OO much easier. I haven't found any utility to the CT that is above the scope of Haskell; it feels like if it's too advanced to implement in Haskell, it's too advanced to find a use case anywhere.

deterministic 4y ago

Agree. I haven’t seen a single practical example of Category Theory being used to come up with a solution that was better than a solution not inferred from Category Theory.

feanaro 4y ago

You can pretty easily invert this principle in order to make it useful. When designing new systems, make it such that it mirrors that concept you've seen before. In making it such, you now know that certain properties will hold and the system will be easier to work with due to this, having less inelegant, sharp edges.