<story><title>Why category theory matters in programming</title><url>https://tech.iheart.com/f585d17b01d3</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ebola1717</author><text>Eh, as someone who works in scala day-to-day, and has studied actual category theory, I think the emphasis on category theory itself is silly.  And in fact, most of the time, more category theory and more monads will make your code worse (e.g. MonadTransformers are D: )&lt;p&gt;Future, which is really a souped up promise abstraction, is the main star, and for-comprehensions are nice syntactic sugar.  Being a &amp;quot;Monad&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t help you do anything with it though. And Future technically doesn&amp;#x27;t even truly obey the Monad laws, because of exceptions.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s useful that a couple of container classes in scala use implement this trait:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    trait ChainableContainer[A] {
      def map(fn: A =&amp;gt; B): ChainableContainer[B]
      def flatten(nested: ChainableContainer[ChainableContainer[A]]):ChainableContainer
    }
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
But beyond making it a little easier to guess what&amp;#x27;s going on, the underlying math isn&amp;#x27;t useful in actual programming.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why category theory matters in programming</title><url>https://tech.iheart.com/f585d17b01d3</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>LolWolf</author><text>Category theory is fine, I guess, but there&amp;#x27;s no need to invoke a sledge-hammer when talking about 99% of most work here.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a little like saying, yes, fine we can reference the hyperreals to derive infinitesimal calculus in a beautiful way, but it&amp;#x27;s mostly abstract and highly involved, even to just understand the foundational aspects (which one may argue is the case for normal calculus, but the notion of local linearity I believe is much more obvious than an extension to the reals). Though it&amp;#x27;s a nice academic exercise, which may even yield some insights, it&amp;#x27;s rather obscure and unintuitive for almost all purposes.&lt;p&gt;This is the way I view category theory and functional programming; though I&amp;#x27;d love to be corrected if I&amp;#x27;m wrong. There&amp;#x27;s no need to invoke almost all of it, since most things can be expressed quite clearly in the language of set theory need there be rigour.</text></comment>