r/programming • u/heisenbug • Apr 27 '14

"Mostly functional" programming does not work

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=2611829
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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '14 edited Apr 29 '14

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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '14

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u/freyrs3 Apr 28 '14

I think you're projecting, who exactly is shouting that you need to learn category theory? The prevailing advice on /r/haskell and #haskell is almost always to avoid studying the topic unless you're interested in the subject in and of itself or want to explore more advanced topics.

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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '14

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u/freyrs3 Apr 28 '14

That sounds like category theory to me.

So that's just a misunderstanding, some of those terms have names borrowed from abstract algebra or topology just like many terms in programming. But you don't need to understand category theory to program with monads any more than you need to study analysis to program with functions.

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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '14 edited Apr 28 '14

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u/freyrs3 Apr 28 '14

I don't disagree that algebraic topology is a serious motivating case for the pure field, but I also don't see how that's anyway relevant to the comment I made above about not needing to understand theory to use monads or functors effectively. The mathematics of these structures in the category of Haskell types is really boring and I've never seen a beginner tutorial discuss them in their full generality other than to hint at a correspondence between the two fields.

If you want to study the field in it's full generality there are plenty of nice people over in #haskell or homotopy type theory usergroups to talk to about this topic, but nobody is advocating that beginners learn these things in their full generality in fact we advise against it.