I don't think either of these statements _really_ evidence the claims the headings make. Good post though, I always find that it's useful to think about the subtleties between mathematical objects and their implementation.
Haskell is not category theory
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Re: Haskell is not category theory
#22And you definitely don't need to learn category theory or know anything about it to start writing programs in Haskell or to maintain and build large Haskell applications. A lot of category theory is fun to learn and knowing it will help you in many ways but it is not a necessary requirement. I mention this because a lot of people seem to think it is. Definitely a nice article for the math-oriented/curious/etc! It's n…
> A lot of category theory is fun to learn and knowing it will help you in many ways I agree with your statement except that part. W.r.t coding, learning functional programing will help you in many ways. Learning category theory will just allow you to say "ah I've seen that concept before" - but it won't really help much.
Re: Haskell is not category theory
#23> If you are looking to learn the language, I recommend Learn You A Haskell. I definitely don't recommend this. While cute, Learn You A Haskell is lacking a lot of pragmatic advice about how to write software in haskell. It's good for getting you up to the FAM trio of type classes but leaves out a lot of practical advice around things like navigating base (what to use and ditch from it), the available community libra…
Re: Haskell is not category theory
#24https://math.andrej.com/2016/08/06/hask-is-not-a-category/
Mathematicians are still thinking about this stuff.
A recent post by Mike Shulman, asking about Agda (Haskell for mathematicians):
https://proofassistants.stackexchange.com/questions/1887/cat...
Re: Haskell is not category theory
#25Haskell is not category theory in the same sense that arithmetic is not group theory: there’s only really one category. Well sort-of because type constructors let you work in different subcategories.
Category theory is about different categories and the nature of the relationships between them. It usually operates at a level of ‘let C be a category…’ with concrete categories or functors being examples. Haskell operates at a level even more concrete than single objects in a single category: the objects are types and Haskell operates on the values of those types. Of course Haskell can work at slightly higher levels too, but it never really escapes categories that look a lot like Hask.
Maybe that statement is too strong though. I’d be keen to see some interesting actual-category-theory level things in Haskell. (Maybe I’m being unfair and these do exist but I am considering them to not count as ‘actual category theory’)
I thought that the ‘categorical theory of patches’ thing was a good example of category theory applied to programming but note that it didn’t require any kind of general notion of e.g. push-outs in a programming language.
Re: Haskell is not category theory
#26> If you are looking to learn the language, I recommend Learn You A Haskell. I definitely don't recommend this. While cute, Learn You A Haskell is lacking a lot of pragmatic advice about how to write software in haskell. It's good for getting you up to the FAM trio of type classes but leaves out a lot of practical advice around things like navigating base (what to use and ditch from it), the available community libra…
No book can give pragmatic advice on that topic, it's an ecosystem that evolves poorly and (lately) quite fast.
You recommend HPFFP but it's also a dated resource for anything but learning nowadays.
Re: Haskell is not category theory
#27> However, if you are proficient with any functional language, especially if it is a dialect of ML, The one, true ML.
Re: Haskell is not category theory
#28Re: Haskell is not category theory
#29This post is literally the "Ackchyually" meme. There is a reason why "fast and loose reasoning is morally correct".
Re: Haskell is not category theory
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought fanboyism was one of the first principles.
The only language I've seen where developers are less fanboys of it than Haskell is C++. Try asking one what is wrong with the language.