--- Mark Carroll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, David Bergman wrote: > (snip) > > Till then, we "Haskellers" will probably continue expressing our > > patterns either directly in Haskell or using highly formal language, > > with terms such as "catamorphisms". > > > > The virtue, and weakness, of traditional design patterns is their > > vagueness and informal character, making them (1) comprehensible to the > > 90% of the developer community not familiar with category theory but (2) > (snip) > > If there are any good ways in which non-mathematicians can get to grips > with these terms from category theory, they would be well worth promoting. > For example, despite having a good computer science degree (in which I was > at least introduced to FP, proof, etc. and even learned to draw the dual > graph of hypercubes) I'm really not equipped to understand catamorphisms > in terms of algebras and homomorphisms, and don't currently have time to > take the math degree I fear I'd need in order to do so. Last time I was > looking at category theory books I think I came to the conclusion that > Lawvere and Schanuel cover things kindly but Pierce seemed to get the > syllabus right, so the "right" book wasn't quite out there. > > My understanding of monads is already a matter of record. Does anyone know > of a friendly text that might help new Haskellers to understand functors, > etc. and what they mean for program design? I'm not averse to the formal > language per se if it can be easily acquired; right now, I worry that I'm > using Haskell suboptimally because, not only do I not know the terminology > well, but I fear that I'm not even cognisant of the concepts that these > terms represent. > > In a nutshell: if these category theory concepts indeed have an important > impact in Haskell land, how to introduce them to working Haskell > programmers well enough that they can use them in engineering software > that's at least half as good as it could be? > > (I'm making the assumption here that it would be good for Haskell to be > much more widely used - it shouldn't solely be for researchers.)
Here's some of what I've come across: Jonathan M. D. Hill, and Keith Clarke "An introduction to category theory, category theory monads, and their relationship to functional programming" ftp://ftp.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/cpc/jon_hill/qmw681.ps.Z http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/SEL-HPC/Articles/GeneratedHtml/functional.monads.html Tom Leinster's Part III Category Theory course given in Cambridge in the academic year 2000-2001: http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~leinster/categories/ John Baez Categories, Quantization, and Much More http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/categories.html (see the links at the bottom of this page, too.) Baez also has interesting info in his series, This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/TWF.html Chris ===== Christopher Milton [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
