FP-Course-ITMO VS milewski-ctfp-pdf

IMO Bartosz Milewski gave a pretty good answer to the "why" question in the preface to his book:

> 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 structured 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.

https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-p...

And regarding:

> Anything that could be useful to you from CT can be explained in one afternoon over some coffee or beer.

Yes, you can go through the definitions, but you won't understand all of those concepts in one afternoon unless you're a savant.

>> He has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before. Compared to that number of semantic levels, the average mathematical theory is almost flat.

> ... is he being unrealistic about programmers here, or does he not have exposure to what a mathematician would consider Mathematics?

As with any sweeping statement, Dijkstra's assertion is not universally applicable to all programmers. However, for some definition of sufficiently skilled programmer, it is correct if one considers the subset of mathematics applicable to provably correct programs. To wit:

https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-p...

Category theory was a godsend from Milewski, esp. his PDF is great! https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-p...

Maybe you can add a little and offer ressources from your background?

I recently started reading Bartosz Milewski's Category Theory for Programmers[0] and while it's less about Haskell directly and more about the ideas behind it, I found it did a much better job at explaining Haskell to me than any other introduction I read before. At least I'm able to appreciate Typing the Technical Interview[1] now. :-)

[0]: https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf

[1]: https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

Category Theory for Programmers by Bartosz Milewski (https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf/releases)

Strangely similar name to the well-known 'Category Theory for Programmers'

https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf

There's this, but the programmer doesn't have to be working:

https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-p...