I get that Category Theory is literally a highly theory-based branch of Mathematics, but would it kill its adherents to list an
actual practical example?
I watched the associated talk[1], and David mentions that Poly is "applicable to database migrations".
Okay, how exactly? What practical problems can I solve with it? Can anyone demonstrate Poly being used somehow for a 1000-table database migration more elegantly than could be achieved using other methods? Is there an O(n^2) or O(exp(n)) scaling lurking in there somewhere, or is this the magic sauce we've all been looking for?
Looking in from the outside, I get the distinct impression that category theorists tend to turn up, simply name things that other people have spent their lives working on, call it "understood", and walk away as-if they've just explained everything that needs to be known about the topic they've merely labelled. They seem like the bug-collectors of mathematics. Okay fine, you've got an impressive collection of bugs, but have you understood evolution well enough from that to help industry with increasing pesticide resistance? Yes? No?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp5_o2lDqj0
I watched the associated talk[1], and David mentions that Poly is "applicable to database migrations".
Okay, how exactly? What practical problems can I solve with it? Can anyone demonstrate Poly being used somehow for a 1000-table database migration more elegantly than could be achieved using other methods? Is there an O(n^2) or O(exp(n)) scaling lurking in there somewhere, or is this the magic sauce we've all been looking for?
Looking in from the outside, I get the distinct impression that category theorists tend to turn up, simply name things that other people have spent their lives working on, call it "understood", and walk away as-if they've just explained everything that needs to be known about the topic they've merely labelled. They seem like the bug-collectors of mathematics. Okay fine, you've got an impressive collection of bugs, but have you understood evolution well enough from that to help industry with increasing pesticide resistance? Yes? No?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp5_o2lDqj0