[Silhouette]

It's worth observing that "background in math" here probably implies postgraduate study in a relevant field, which very few people will actually have done. The average new math graduate with a bachelor's degree might have heard of category theory but probably hasn't studied it during an undergraduate course.

More generally, I think one problem the Haskell world has with attracting more developers is that it's dominated by people with a very "pure maths" mindset. The people developing and advocating Haskell often enjoy exploring the abstraction possibilities and interactions for their own sake, just as a research pure mathematician studying some form of advanced algebra might. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that, and as a platform for programming language research it's probably an asset to have a lot of such people involved. However, most other people, even those of a technical persuasion, do not find such a purely theoretical approach interesting. They want motivation for any theory they are learning and they want practical applications to show why it's relevant.

[agumonkey]

But most of the FP culture comes from abstract mathematics. Formal proofs (ml), Symbolic rewriting systems (lisp deriv), ... The issue is that people see programming as the semi concrete modification of devices (we need tangible at first), when these people saw programming as recursive logic over anything, that can be mapped later on actual (or virtual) hardware.

[dllthomas]

While it takes exposure to Category Theory to have knowledge of Monads in particular, a course in undergraduate level Abstract Algebra gives a good enough foothold to make the mathematical definitions of "monad" tractable.

[msie]

A crude analogy would be mathematicians exploring math vs physicists using math.