Category Theory for Programmers: The Preface by Bartosz Milewski.
From the post:
For some time now I’ve been floating the idea of writing a book about category theory that would be targeted at programmers. Mind you, not computer scientists but programmers — engineers rather than scientists. I know this sounds crazy and I am properly scared. I can’t deny that there is a huge gap between science and engineering because I have worked on both sides of the divide. But I’ve always felt a very strong compulsion to explain things. I have tremendous admiration for Richard Feynman who was the master of simple explanations. I know I’m no Feynman, but I will try my best. I’m starting by publishing this preface — which is supposed to motivate the reader to learn category theory — in hopes of starting a discussion and soliciting feedback.
I will attempt, in the space of a few paragraphs, to convince you that this book is written for you, and whatever objections you might have to learning one of the most abstracts branches of mathematics in your “copious spare time” are totally unfounded.
My optimism is based on several observations. First, category theory is a treasure trove of extremely useful programming ideas. Haskell programmers have been tapping this resource for a long time, and the ideas are slowly percolating into other languages, but this process is too slow. We need to speed it up.
Second, there are many different kinds of math, and they appeal to different audiences. You might be allergic to calculus or algebra, but it doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy category theory. I would go as far as to argue that category theory is the kind of math that is particularly well suited for the minds of programmers. That’s because category theory — rather than dealing with particulars — deals with structure. It deals with the kind of structure that makes programs composable.
Composition is at the very root of category theory — it’s part of the definition of the category itself. And I will argue strongly that composition is the essence of programming. We’ve been composing things forever, long before some great engineer came up with the idea of a subroutine. Some time ago the principles of structural programming revolutionized programming because they made blocks of code composable. Then came object oriented programming, which is all about composing objects. Functional programming is not only about composing functions and algebraic data structures — it makes concurrency composable — something that’s virtually impossible with other programming paradigms.
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See the rest of the preface and the promise to provide examples in code for most major concepts.
Are you ready for discussion and feedback?