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Re:Computers are made of metal, not category theory by wpietri on Wednesday October 01, 2014 @02:58PM (#8396864)
Yes. To oversimplify, it seems like there are two schools of software: the car-mechanic school and the math-professor school. I happen to be of the car mechanic variety. That doesn't mean I'm not borrowing energetically from people pursuing the math-professor approach, but by now I'm pretty sure where my strengths lie. And given that computers (and cars) are mainly used for practical outcomes, I'm totally ok with that bias.
Re:Computers are made of metal, not category theory by dxbydt on Wednesday October 01, 2014 @03:50PM (#8397236)
>the car-mechanic school and the math-professor school.

Heh heh. Having worked mostly with math professors, I would say the code they write almost exclusively belongs to the car-mechanic school. Math professors never deck up their code with CT. The majority of the time a math prof has to write code, its to do heavy-duty applied math, engg stuff ( solve pde's, fluid mechanics, EE math, fourier transforms, gradients etc. ) or to display some cool visualization to the students ( here's how a vector space looks! here is what happens when you apply linear transformation!! here are all the elements of a quotient group!!! ) - those tend to be done in Matlab/Mathematica/Maple/Gap...and these tools have zero CT. The applied stuff tends to use netlib, gams, gsl, colt, apache math...mostly a lot of gsl these days...again no CT there. Most of them are very happy to declare giant matrices & happily mutate away.

Re:Computers are made of metal, not category theory by wpietri on Friday October 03, 2014 @01:35PM (#8406546)
Heh. Yeah, a lot of the actual PhD-types I know are amateur coders on a mission, and their code matches that.

I'm sure you get it, but just for the record, by math-professor I meant "very focused on things that to most people seem incredibly abstract", with a side of "passionate about solving intellectual challenges for their own sake".