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A monoid is a category, a category is a monad, a monad is a monoid

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Re: A monoid is a category, a category is a monad, a monad is a monoid

#3
post #2

Are there really that many people on NH that can understand this? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm legitimately interested. It seems like this class of knowledge is highly specialized, yet I see posts like these high up on NH frequently.

No, but those who feel like computer scientists rather than programmers do aspire to.

Re: A monoid is a category, a category is a monad, a monad is a monoid

#4
post #2

Are there really that many people on NH that can understand this? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm legitimately interested. It seems like this class of knowledge is highly specialized, yet I see posts like these high up on NH frequently.

I only know this famous quote:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3870088/a-monad-is-just-a...

But I didn't really try to understand it.

Re: A monoid is a category, a category is a monad, a monad is a monoid

#6
post #2

Are there really that many people on NH that can understand this? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm legitimately interested. It seems like this class of knowledge is highly specialized, yet I see posts like these high up on NH frequently.

Persevere, it will make sense eventually. But then again when can one say to really understand things.

Re: A monoid is a category, a category is a monad, a monad is a monoid

#7
post #2

Are there really that many people on NH that can understand this? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm legitimately interested. It seems like this class of knowledge is highly specialized, yet I see posts like these high up on NH frequently.

I'd be more interested to know whether there's a practical use of understanding it on this level. I wanted to learn about monads and wrote some smaller Java examples using streams and flatmap. You can see the benefit and understand how it's implemented very easily. However, the academic explanations and notations were not helpful and I'd argue made understanding the concept needlessly complicated.

Re: A monoid is a category, a category is a monad, a monad is a monoid

#9
post #2

Are there really that many people on NH that can understand this? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm legitimately interested. It seems like this class of knowledge is highly specialized, yet I see posts like these high up on NH frequently.

It's very hard to make use of any of it, I don't get it either. It's not like you need to understand monads (the category theory idea) to use monads (the PL idea) in, say, Haskell.

Re: A monoid is a category, a category is a monad, a monad is a monoid

#10
post #2

Are there really that many people on NH that can understand this? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm legitimately interested. It seems like this class of knowledge is highly specialized, yet I see posts like these high up on NH frequently.

The last of the astronauts stared back at a tiny spec in the sky, their old planet, J2EE.

It was once a teeming garden world, but after replacing every species several times, the increasingly abstract creatures failed to thrive. Many wars were faught, poisoning the planet itself with leaky abstractions and broken factories.

They knew many years ago, the planet was dying. The most enterprisey scientists of the world gathered in secret to build a colony ship, free from abstraction. A chance to start over and build a more functional place.

And now on this new planet, they cast off the old ways of objects and threads, embracing monads and async promises for a better future. This time, the scientists reasoned, it would be better. And so they replaced their first species, the monoid.

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