Actegories

51 pointsposted 2 days ago
by ibobev
(bartoszmilewski.com)

9 Comments

lyall

2 days ago

If you saw TFA and thought "hmmm yes, I know some of those words", then I can recommend the author's own lecture series on YouTube [0]. It's an intro to and overview of category theory aimed at programmers, with the requisite context and motivation for why anyone should care. It's long but worth the time investment IMHO.

0: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbgaMIhjbmEnaH_LTkxLI7...

ultimatefan1

2 days ago

this has a real "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" energy to it

paulluuk

2 days ago

> To understand actegories, let’s start with the definition of a monoidal category

Definitely not written for someone with my starting knowledge, haha.

xqb64

2 days ago

I'd like to understand how and why this stuff is useful for programmers.

jcarrano

2 days ago

Watch his lecture series on YouTube. We you started programming, you had to adapt your brain to the way of thinking of computer programs. Think of this as an continuation of that evolution, were you acquire new methods of reasoning that can abstract many apparently different problems into the same concept.

xqb64

2 days ago

Is it only applicable in e.g. Haskell, though, or is it language agnostic? Thanks for your answer.

lioeters

a day ago

In a different comment thread, someone mentioned the book, Category Theory for Programmers. Here's the Releases page with PDF files (click to open the Assets section). https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf/releases

There are several versions with code examples in Haskell, OCaml, ReasonML, and Scala. These are all typically associated with functional programming and category theory. However, category theory is a much wider and deeper subject than any specific language, and deals with mathematical objects and concepts relevant to (more or less) all of programming.

speed_spread

2 days ago

Uh thanks but I'm gonna stick with Scattergories for now.