JohnDCook has started @FunctorFact, tweets “..about category theory and functional programming.”
John has a page listing his Twitter accounts. It needs to be updated to reflect the addition of @FunctorFact.
BTW, just by accident I’m sure, John’s blog post for today is titled: Category theory and Koine Greek. It has the following lesson for topic map practitioners and theorists:
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Another lesson from that workshop, the one I want to focus on here, is that you don’t always need to convey how you arrived at an idea. Specifically, the leader of the workshop said that if you discover something interesting from reading the New Testament in Greek, you can usually present your point persuasively using the text in your audience’s language without appealing to Greek. This isn’t always possible—you may need to explore the meaning of a Greek word or two—but you can use Greek for your personal study without necessarily sharing it publicly. The point isn’t to hide anything, only to consider your audience. In a room full of Greek scholars, bring out the Greek.This story came up in a recent conversation about category theory. You might discover something via category theory but then share it without discussing category theory. If your audience is well versed in category theory, then go ahead and bring out your categories. But otherwise your audience might be bored or intimidated, as many people would be listening to an argument based on the finer points of Koine Greek grammar. Microsoft’s LINQ software, for example, was inspired by category theory principles, but you’d be hard pressed to find any reference to this because most programmers don’t want to know or need to know where it came from. They just want to know how to use it.
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Sure, it is possible to recursively map subject identities in order to arrive at a useful and maintainable mapping between subject domains, but the people with the checkbook are only interested in a viable result.
How you got there could involve enslaved pixies for all they care. They do care about negative publicity so keep your use of pixies to yourself.
Looking forward to tweets from @FunctorFact!