> How do people that don't have PhDs bridge the gap in their knowledge from what's commonly taught/used (OOP and it's design patterns) to thinking in terms of monads/monoids/functors/etc.
In my own experience, you just practice, and munch new knowledge bits by bits. The crucial point here is that you don't need to know _all_ of haskell to be productive using it.
So you learn the basics, start using monads without understanding the Monad abstraction (it's really not something you need to understand to use), and after a while it just clicks. And once you're confortable with this basic knowledge, you learn new things when you need them.
As a result, I (and many other paid haskellers) have a job writing haskell without having a PhD, without learning category theory, or without a deep math bagage.
> How do people that don't have PhDs bridge the gap in their knowledge from what's commonly taught/used (OOP and it's design patterns) to thinking in terms of monads/monoids/functors/etc.
In my own experience, you just practice, and munch new knowledge bits by bits. The crucial point here is that you don't need to know _all_ of haskell to be productive using it.
So you learn the basics, start using monads without understanding the Monad abstraction (it's really not something you need to understand to use), and after a while it just clicks. And once you're confortable with this basic knowledge, you learn new things when you need them.
As a result, I (and many other paid haskellers) have a job writing haskell without having a PhD, without learning category theory, or without a deep math bagage.