Robert and Jon, As a mathematician, I appreciate the power of category theory. But I also spent 30 years working on reseach & development proejcts at IBM, where I had to present many mathematical issues in ways that engineers could appreciate. That gives me quite a bit of sympathy for Jon's reaction to category theory. I recommend the article by Joseph Goguen on "Tossing algebraic flowers down the great divide": http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/tcs97.pdf . Goguen was a pioneer in applying category theory to complex problems in computer science, but he was frustrated by the "great divide" between the theoreticians and the practitioners. That article is an auobiography of his efforts to bridge the divide. John
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