> about bringing together concepts
Well, yes, obviously. My analogy is just that: it's like bug collection, bringing together a bunch of samples from many fields into a single museum.
My criticism, I think, is still valid. Just because you've renamed things in a bunch of fields with a consistently obtuse verbiage doesn't mean you've understood anything, or improved any of the fields in a material way. There's a lot of promise, but little delivery.
Category theory is the string theory of mathematics. There. I said it.
I raised a similar critique here before, asking for practical examples from computer science where CT has made a contribution, and someone linked to a CT explanation of automatic differentiation (popularised due to AI).
The thing is, AD predated CT substantially, and was well-understood for a long time. The original theoretical description of AD is something I understood, and the CT description of it was impenetrable, and not useful.
Category theory is something I've always wanted to succeed. It feels like we're on the cusp of something great, like formalising every part of programming languages and compilers for provably correct transformations and optimisations. That would be amazing, but every time I dig into the promise of CT all I see is some hand-wavy "it's applicable to field X" with literally zero further discussion, examples, or practice.
Well, yes, obviously. My analogy is just that: it's like bug collection, bringing together a bunch of samples from many fields into a single museum.
My criticism, I think, is still valid. Just because you've renamed things in a bunch of fields with a consistently obtuse verbiage doesn't mean you've understood anything, or improved any of the fields in a material way. There's a lot of promise, but little delivery.
Category theory is the string theory of mathematics. There. I said it.
I raised a similar critique here before, asking for practical examples from computer science where CT has made a contribution, and someone linked to a CT explanation of automatic differentiation (popularised due to AI).
The thing is, AD predated CT substantially, and was well-understood for a long time. The original theoretical description of AD is something I understood, and the CT description of it was impenetrable, and not useful.
Category theory is something I've always wanted to succeed. It feels like we're on the cusp of something great, like formalising every part of programming languages and compilers for provably correct transformations and optimisations. That would be amazing, but every time I dig into the promise of CT all I see is some hand-wavy "it's applicable to field X" with literally zero further discussion, examples, or practice.