I wonder what Eduardo Dubuc means by "the Benabou-Taylor confrontation". Could he possibly be referring to the Christmas flame-war to which Eduardo was himself a major contributor, but which I attempted to settle with him privately and amicably? I suggest that he and Marta Bunga should go for a long walk to calm down. I'm not pointing any fingers at Eduardo or Marta, but those who were active in category theory in the 1960s and 70s would be well advised to think twice before accusing those who came later of bringing category theory into disrepute. I wonder when the phrases "generalised abstract nonsense" and "empty set theory" came into circulation? I seem to remember hearing them when I was an undergraduate. I wonder which generation it was that got prestigeous jobs in mathematics departments at a time when (at least in Britain) they were being given away in corn flakes packets? Which generation is it that struggles to get jobs in computer science departments? Which subject was it, according to the participants of a parallel conference in Vancouver in 2004, whose followers were "easily recognisable because they're all so old"? Which generation was it that alienated other mathematicians by making outrageous claims about the foundations of mathematics that it never backed up with theorems? Which generation actually got its hands dirty and proved the theorems that relate category theory to other foundational disciplines? I have no idea what John Baez's standing is amongst physicists. Therefore Marta is quite correct in warning me that it would be foolish for me to base public claims of the value of category theory on its applications to physics. John is nevertheless very welcome in our community, in my humble opinion, BECAUSE he brings in new ideas from physics, BECAUSE he exports some of our ideas in return, and because he is good at presenting ideas of either kind. Also, I don't need to be specific about them to say that the applications to physics, computation, topology, geometry, analysis, ... are the reasons why I consider that category theory is a Good Thing. In my experience, category theory as a tool usually points me in the right direction, whereas set theory usually points me in the wrong one. (To give credit where it is due, Jamie Gabbay's work on alpha-equivalence is a counterexample.) Category theory has been successful on many many occasions - starting in algebraic topology - in removing the clutter of ad hoc definitions that have no conceptual anchor. For example, I was once told that "a matrix is an array of numbers". I am currently looking into Interval Analysis, in which all of the textbooks begin with a chapter of miscellaneous notation based on defining an interval as a pair [a,b] or as the subset of classical real numbers that lie between them - "analysis with double vision", as I call it. (To give credit again where it is due, the "Interval Newton" algorithm is a genuine insight into solving equations - it does not just do what you might imagine it does.) So I urge Marta, Eduardo and everybody else to stop trying to "police" category theory, and instead celebrate its achievements in many areas of mathematics. Paul Taylor www.cs.man.ac.uk/~pt - new web pages and new stuff.