Dear Mike, I suppose what I'm really looking for is cool algorithms like the one described in Backhouse's paper "Fusion on Languages" (thanks, Neel!) where they either wouldn't have been discovered without category theory, or where category theory is the only decent way to understand the algorithm. While not quite what you are looking for Rydeheard and Burstall<http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/~david/categories/book/book.pdf>might provide a good jumping off point. Best wishes, --greg On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Mike Stay <metaweta@gmail.com> wrote:
2009/12/25 Carsten Führmann <c.fuhrmann@bath.ac.uk>:
I used the term "functional [programming] language" on purpose (as opposed to "functional programming style"), because of your statement
So there's not a lot of call for learning a functional programming language either.
which I feel might be wrong.
OK, I worded that badly. I think there are lots of reasons to learn functional programming, and once you're doing functional programming, then you need to learn category theory to do it well.
Most of the code we've got is not functional, and the languages we work with make it hard to use higher-order functions and closures. So there's some resistance to overcome in convincing people to use functional style.
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