Re:Does category theory make you a better programmer?
by jkbyc on Monday July 30, 2012 @05:36PM
(#4314807)
What exactly would be the benefit of using category theory? What would you gain in comparison to doing just normal homomorphisms? And that's even assuming you would be able to find a homomorphism at all; it may well be prevented by the ontologies being mutually inconsistent, right?
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Re:Does category theory make you a better programmer?
by Dn_Ab on Monday July 30, 2012 @06:25PM
(#4315001)
The benefit is its flaw. Because it is so abstract it is able to describe many, many things. It can serve as a basis for all of maths and unlike set theory really focuses on structure. Very roughly, think of it like functional programming to Set theory's imperative nature.
Re:Does category theory make you a better programmer?
by blair_strang on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @04:32AM
(#4316273)
I'm not getting your analogy :/
Re:Does category theory make you a better programmer?
by Dn_Ab on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @05:53AM
(#4316449)
It is not a tight analogy. But: In set theory you pay a lot of attention to the internals of collections of objects. In category theory you are more interested in capturing structure and relationships.
In imperative programming you specify the internal sequence that makes up an operation, in functional programming you are more interested in the high level declarations, compositions and that the constraints on them are satisfied.