Monads are monoids in the category of endofunctors

Re:Monads are monoids in the category of endofunctors by Littlebigo on Thursday September 09, 2021 @10:03PM (#28476969)

I very much agree with part of your point, especially the novice-intermediate-expert part on jargon. I generally favor wording that is as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sometimes technical precision is important, and when talking to colleagues and other people that are on a similar technical proficiency level as me I prefer concise and informative words. I'd rather say "ARP poisoning" than "network attack", because the latter loses information, but would obviously use the latter to muggles.

I don't agree that having a domain jargon that is technical and concise is "gatekeeping" for functional programming. If you are a frontend developer you need to know what the DOM is. If you are a Haskell programmer you need to know what a monad is. The fact that you don't get the Haskell jargon "for free" coming from other programming disciplines doesn't mean that it's "gated", it just means you need to learn. And there are plentiful resources to help you with that, countless "how to understand monads" articles and so on. In my experience, the Haskell community is perhaps the single most welcoming and helpful programming community. There's even a handy guide with big, friendly drawings.

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Re:Monads are monoids in the category of endofunctors by tomc1985 on Friday September 10, 2021 @12:05AM (#28477694)

My point wasn't so much a dig at FP as it was at programming in general. For example, I started my career writing Perl, which uses the word 'hash' to describe a dictionary-like datastructure. But Python uses the word 'dictionary' to mean the same thing. Javascript's equivalent is an 'object', though it is effectively a different. Other languages call this datastructure a 'map', others an 'associative array', and so on.

It's like, effing pick one! And if you have to have multiple why do they have to overlap with other completely different things? When I first read about a 'map' in this context I was very confused.

You also see this a lot comparing Microsoft environments to everyone else. Reading microsoft docs in the late 90s (which is where I first learned a lot of these concepts) you learn one set of vocabulary, and then in the _nix and webdev worlds you learn a whole different set. Take 'databinding', for example... I have not once heard this term used discussing shadow DOM stuff like React or Vue, yet databinding is exactly one of the services they provide. But no, they have to call it something different, making a lot of prior-art type research much more difficult than it needs to be. Perhaps it is part of the reason why the webdev world seems so intent on pointlessly repeating history. It hampers discussion and contributes to the conceptual isolation and tribalism that seems so common in this field.

(And in the perl example, yes I know it's short for hashtable and that this is because this dictionary-like thing is exactly that, but I think that from an end-user's point of view it would be best if all these different terms were unified)

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