I'm writing a book [1] about "bona fide" applications of mathematics to practical programming problems, where bona fide is my own personal definition [2]. I've had my eye on claims of applications of category theory for many years, and none of them have quite fit the bill (sorry, John, if you're reading this). When they talk about applications to databases it seems quite unrealistic or lacking in sufficient detail to evaluate. And when I talk to people who are actually on the front lines that try to use category theory to solve some problem, they tell me that it ended up being completely useless.
I'm open to having my mind changed. The one application that's come the closest is UMAP, [3] though the last time I checked, a few years ago, the jury was still out on whether the structure it produces in applied contexts like biology is spurious.
So what specific applications do you know of category theory to practical problems? For the purpose of this post "application" means used by someone in a production software setting to solve a problem not related to category theory. Someone who doesn't care about category theory should care about the problem being solved.
And, to be sure, category theory is fine an dandy in its applications to other areas of math, as a unifying language for homology and whatnot. I'm talking about the kind of claims category theory folks sometimes make like "category theory is ushering in a programming revolution and you need to learn it to stay relevant"
[1]: http://pmfpbook.org/
[2]: https://buttondown.email/j2kun/archive/whats-in-production/
[3]: https://umap-learn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
I'm open to having my mind changed. The one application that's come the closest is UMAP, [3] though the last time I checked, a few years ago, the jury was still out on whether the structure it produces in applied contexts like biology is spurious.
So what specific applications do you know of category theory to practical problems? For the purpose of this post "application" means used by someone in a production software setting to solve a problem not related to category theory. Someone who doesn't care about category theory should care about the problem being solved.
And, to be sure, category theory is fine an dandy in its applications to other areas of math, as a unifying language for homology and whatnot. I'm talking about the kind of claims category theory folks sometimes make like "category theory is ushering in a programming revolution and you need to learn it to stay relevant"
[1]: http://pmfpbook.org/
[2]: https://buttondown.email/j2kun/archive/whats-in-production/
[3]: https://umap-learn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/