Yeah, I also have a mathematics degree and don't really get the fascination that computer people have with category theory. I have never been particularly impressed with their claims of applicability. It seems to just complicate things for very little benefit. It's a pretty abstraction, but I don't see actual results from it. People use ugly, practical things like git, not beautiful categorical abstractions like pijul.
> Yeah, I also have a mathematics degree and don't really get the fascination that computer people have with category theory.
This point seems to be repeated with every new mathematics.
> It's a pretty abstraction, but I don't see actual results from it.
It has applications in physics and is widely used in computation, particularly for reasoning about composition of programs with side effects. With respect, if you don't see any actual results, you haven't been looking.
> With respect, if you don't see any actual results, you haven't been looking.
With respect, if you think any category-theoretic results were necessary to author even 0.01% of the code executed in computation globally, you're willfully deluding yourself.
Good thing I never made that claim. I will however claim that, despite being unnecessary in principle, quite a bit more than 0.01% of code executed globally did make use of category theoretic abstractions because they are so useful (depending on how you measure this of course). Pretty much any program written for .NET and Scala makes use of monadic composition.
I will also claim that their use is only going to grow with Rust adoption and Java adopting lambdas and functional APIs.
You said "It has applications in physics and is widely used in computation". Category theory is not widely used by those who program computers and thus produce computation in them.
> I will however claim that, despite being unnecessary in principle, quite a bit more than 0.01% of code executed globally did make use of category theoretic abstractions because they are so useful (depending on how you measure this of course). Pretty much any program written for .NET and Scala makes use of monadic composition.
And like clockwork, you provide the bog-standard argument for why knowing category theory is important: you point out how many people productively write software without knowing anything about category theory (or even abstract algebra).
Saying that people use category theory to write software without knowing it is like saying they use Maxwell's Laws to write software: so reductive it loses all relevance to productive conversation. That's bad, unless your goal is to make the conversation unproductive.
> It seems to just complicate things for very little benefit. It's a pretty abstraction, but I don't see actual results from it.
This is a curse which keeps affecting large groups of programmers, to read about some pretty looking abstraction and then wanting to use it everywhere regardless if it is suitable or not. I'm thinking of Design Patterns, CQRS, complex microservice architectures etc.
Yes. I don't think knowing about category theory makes you more proficient in using or designing functional languages either. Lambda calculus has much more obvious utility. Even things similar to monads can be described more simply without abstract nonsense: state is just another variable that you are passing along in your functions. The best books on Haskell do not dwell on category theory.
There's actually a bit of harm too: the abstract nonsense seems to make it harder to reason about execution speed and makes it very easy to write very slow code. I know a lot of people have a hard time being able to predict the speed with which, say, Haskell code will run.
