Re:Category Theory for Programmers (2014)
by bykovich on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @12:38AM
(#14029516)
It's not clear to me that category theory, functional programming, what have you, provide insight into why things work. In fact, it seems like they might cut the opposite way -- moving from vicissitudes to simple abstractions.
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Category theory provides the tools (a language, a set of theorems, etc) to understand why certain things are necessarily true, rather than just "true in practice" or true because of a happy coincidence, similar (IMO) to how complexity analysis gives you the tools to know that merge sort necessarily has a certain baseline performance, rather than just happening to run through all your unit tests quickly.