Why I am learning category theory
the.scapegoat.dev
Why I am learning category theory
1–10 of 224 posts
Re: Why I am learning category theory
#2Bartosz Milewski's series of lectures on YouTube is a really engaging and enjoyable introduction to category theory. These are really helping me get it.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbgaMIhjbmEnaH_LTkxLI...
Re: Why I am learning category theory
#3I strongly recommend this presentation: "John Baez: "Symmetric Monoidal Categories A Rosetta Stone"[0]. It is easy to get lost in the ocean of theorems and definitions and overlook some powerful core concepts.
Re: Why I am learning category theory
#4Will it make you a better React dev tho?
Re: Why I am learning category theory
#5Will it make you a better React dev tho?
Author here, I actually think so. The rendering of the virtual DOM as well as hooks are fairly interesting mathematical constructs. A pattern I use a lot in web applications is the state reducer, which is really a fold over events and state. Seeing the functional nature of it (and reactive programming in general) can make for quite composable react code, while it is easy to make either a verbose mess of propdrilling or do a lot of tricky context mixing.
Re: Why I am learning category theory
#6Super cool-- love the discussion around diagrams and why they're so critical to humans
Re: Why I am learning category theory
#7As someone with a maths degree, yet who admittedly hasn't looked into category theory beyond some basic notions, I still don't quite understand why anyone would want to learn category theory before e.g. abstract algebra or even just fundamental mathematical reasoning (definition, theorem, proof).
Maybe I'm missing something but it seems to me that all you can study monads in programming languages without having to also learn the category theory abstraction of it. The same goes for semigroups, monoids, folds, functors, ...
I'm sure there's a benefit in category theory once you want to unify all these abstractions and talk about all of them together, but I see so many people who think they have to learn CT before they can understand monads in e.g. Haskell, and I don't really understand why.
Re: Why I am learning category theory
#8Honestly, this is a waste of time and is not going to help as much as the author thinks it is. There is no secret from category theory that will make one's design 10x better. Not everything is even applicable.
>I hope that category theory will allow me to formalize my intuitive understanding of abstraction, put words to it, and use those words (or, better, words others have written) to explain my thinking.
Note how this goal doesn't include anything about improving the author's software engineering ability. The goal is to be able to use category theory to describe existing concepts. Why not us just describe it in ways that 99% of software engineers already understand? Why not learn good software design directly instead of through a subset of category theory which you have to translate?
Re: Why I am learning category theory
#9As someone with a maths degree, yet who admittedly hasn't looked into category theory beyond some basic notions, I still don't quite understand why anyone would want to learn category theory before e.g. abstract algebra or even just fundamental mathematical reasoning (definition, theorem, proof). Maybe I'm missing something but it seems to me that all you can study monads in programming languages without having to al…
author here, for context, I do have a reasonable background in maths (algebra, analysis, statistics) at a CS master-ish level (self-taught and a long time ago, though), as well as spent quite some time with programming language / type theory when I was younger, and I do use monads quite a bit in my day to day programming. In fact, the fundamental algebra concepts (rings, groups, etc...) as well as fundamental CS theory (grammars, proof theory, semantics, ...) were the only maths I felt reasonably comfortable with, compared to say, calculus or statistics which really did my head in and ultimately caused me to drop out of university.
Re: Why I am learning category theory
#10Honestly, this is a waste of time and is not going to help as much as the author thinks it is. There is no secret from category theory that will make one's design 10x better. Not everything is even applicable. >I hope that category theory will allow me to formalize my intuitive understanding of abstraction, put words to it, and use those words (or, better, words others have written) to explain my thinking. Note how t…
author here, the way I see it is that nothing about my software per se will change. I do indeed like to write things in a "plain" fashion instead of littering my code with high-level constructs that only a few people understand.
However, it is "generative" knowledge. Having a good intuition for monads is what allows me to break down a fair amount of the mundane tasks I have to do (say, breaking down and migrating infrastructure configuration) in steps that work and stand the test of time. That's the thing about say, monad. An applied monad just looks utterly trivial, because, really, they are. If they weren't they wouldn't be worth using.
It also allows me to mine the literature or reuse things I've worked out in the past, for example exploiting monoidal structure for optimizing computation by leveraging associativity, for example.