>> I won't look at it again for a different reason. They're the types that >> say "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's >> the problem?" > > > Sure, so one should point out that problem may be made out to be that the > monoidal product [1][2] is underspecified for someone unfamiliar with the > convention (in this case it should be given by composition of endofunctors, > and the associator is given pointwise by identity morphisms). (But of > course, the more fundamental problem is actually that this characterization > is not abstract enough and hence harder to decipher than necessary. A monad > can be defined in an arbitrary bicategory... :o) ) > > What do /you/ think is the problem?
I remember finding this while exploring Haskell, some years ago: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Zygohistomorphic_prepromorphisms And thinking: Ah, I get it, it's a joke: they know they are considered a bunch of strangely mathematically-influenced developers, but they have a sense of humor and know how to be tongue-in-cheek and have gentle fun at themselves. (My strange free association was: Zygo => zygomatics muscle => smile & laughter => joke). That actually got me interested in Haskell :) But, apparently, I was all wrong ;-) It got me reading entire books on category theory and type theory, though.
