While I understand Feynman’s point that mathematicians love to generalize everything and that physicists focus on what actually works in the real world, as prog

While I understand Feynman’s point that mathematicians love to generalize everything and that physicists focus on what actually works in the real world, as programmers, we’re doing something different from both of those groups. We’re engaged in a mix of engineering and analysis. We need to build systems that hold together under real conditions. Category theory might seem obsessed with abstraction. In some ways, it is. However, when skilled practitioners apply these tools to areas of computer science and engineering, the point isn’t to create generalized abstractions. The point is identify the minimal, leak-proof abstractions needed to fulfill some desired quality. While I understand the language sounds very general, cryptic and off-putting, it’s also very precise. While category theory might seem like a discipline that’s obsessed with generalizations, in practice, the abstractions one constructs using categorical tools can be very specific. The point isn’t always to construct the most general abstractions, it’s to construct abstraction that actually work 100% of the time. The irony is, mathematicians and computer scientists who are concerned with rigor often do this by proving specific cases first and then incrementally generalizing, not the other way around.