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Re:Categories from scratch by sanderjd on Monday May 12, 2014 @06:42PM (#7735823)
Ha, I actually read his last sentence as sarcasm initially and thought "haven't I heard this joke..." only to find that you had already referenced the one I was thinking of:

"A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"

Re:Categories from scratch by daffodil2 on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @01:08AM (#7736644)
I didn't mean to imply it was trivial to understand, but it's no more difficult than the formal definition of, say, a derivative (which involves a limit, and hence an epsilon-delta construction, which in my experience are not so easy to fit in your head at first). Understanding what a multigraph is should be doable.
Re:Categories from scratch by sanderjd on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @12:56PM (#7739176)
I totally agree with you, but jargon of all kinds just sounds funny to people unaccustomed to it, regardless of its difficulty to understand!