[rout39574]

... The idea is that, simultaneously, categories are an extremely powerful intellectual tool, and also imprison your thoughts.

In general life, as an odd monkey wandering around a built environment, that's Zen. The categories being challenged include such fundamental ones as "Self/Other"

In coding, identifying categories and choosing to perceive them or ignore them is fundamental to debugging. "The variable claims it's $foo; but I see back there it was set to $bar...." Strip away a layer of assumptions, and look underneath at what is _really_ there.

Iterated, this is what leads you to understanding performance all the way down to the silicon.