You're conflating tools with products. Having to understand electricity, trigonometry, and basic signal analysis to use an oscilloscope does not mean that osci

You're conflating tools with products. Having to understand electricity, trigonometry, and basic signal analysis to use an oscilloscope does not mean that oscilloscopes are not useful tools. Those are simply prerequisite knowledge to work as a professional in the field, and the tool is made for professionals. Nobody is complaining that imperative programmers have to learn how memory works, how conditional control structures work, etc. And yet when functional programmers can benefit from learning category theory, suddenly it's a huge problem. This is just anti-intellectualism, nothing else. The term category theory scares people off, and so rather than acknowledge that failing within themselves, they throw it back on the functional programmers and say that programmers shouldn't have to learn category theory. NB: You really don't need to learn category theory to program effectively in Haskell. You can benefit from it, but it is absolutely unnecessary.