[hyperbovine]

It's this vogueish thing among a certain set of programmers to go around saying they learned category theory. I studied category theory as a math graduate student and frankly, if your goal is simply to become a better programmer, there are much more direct and productive ways to achieve that goal.

[james_s_tayler]

I can certainly appreciate ways that there are more direct and productive ways to become a better programmer.

My goal is to become a better thinker in general. Specifically with regards to seeing how one type of thing relates to another type of thing.

I'm actually more interested in better understanding and reasoning about the ecology of software development than becoming a better programmer per se but only because on some level I think that's actually necessary in order to achieve the writing of better software.

To put that into English... we don't write software in a vacuum. We write it in a team, in a company, in a world full of other programmers and there is a rich set of relationships among all of those things that is exerting pressure on the final shape the software takes.

Category Theory seems like fun and useful tangent that might help me understand the world better and be mildly useful in an abstract way.