[deltasevennine]

Then your comment doesn't make sense to me. If you designed programs in haskell then you designed them using concepts from category theory.

Category theory isn't just about how haskell works. You use it to design your programs. Haskell is basically a category theory framework.

I would say you didn't get very far then if you didn't come out of learning haskell with the realization of how you design programs with CT.

[sicp-enjoyer]

> If you designed programs in haskell then you designed them using concepts from category theory.

It's the level of abstraction and focus. Category theory can describe "mapping over promises" it doesn't give a lot of insight into how to design an internet communication protocol with low latency (for example).

> I would say you didn't get very far then

Sounds like you put a lot of value in your experience with this topic and I am unlikely to convince you.

[deltasevennine]

I actually agree with you. Its not a good theory for finding optimal speed.

I would say it's more of a better theory for optimal organization and reuse of code. It's a theory of interfaces. If programming is all about abstraction then CT is the theory of design and abstraction.

I agree that detail and speed and execution are important in computer science but these things maybe aren't general enough as the efficiency of speed also relies on which turing complete language (out of an unlimited set of languages) that is used to drive the computation.

We also do have a general theory for optimizing speed. Computational Complexity theory. Which is based on Knuth's little assembly language. This theory can literally help you converge onto the best possible solution. Not by calculation but it can quantify the speed of an algorithm for definitive comparisons.

But then would complexity theory be the Maxwell's equations of programming? I think there's a good argument for that route but I don't think that's what the OP is thinking about in his article.

The op is thinking about design because Lisp is definitely a design philosophy. Lisp won't help you design an internet communication protocol for low latency either.

Maybe you did study category theory deeply but your thinking about it from an angle of computational cost. This is certainly valid. Apologies for that comment, Haskell and CT like any other design pattern out there is usually not targeted specifically at optimizing speed, but more for optimizing code reuse and increasing modularity. It's for dealing with technical debt and how to handle the complexity of programming through abstraction.

If you're thinking about it from that angle then I think the universe already has your answer. Computational Complexity theory is the Maxwell's equations of software. It's not a very complete theory but it's much more concrete then all the other "design" stuff in computer science.

[hither_shores]

> Haskell is basically a category theory framework.

Haskell probably draws more from category theory than any other mainstream language, but in absolute terms that's still not very much. It's okayish for modelling cartesian closed categories, but if you want any more structure than that things get quite painful. Even something as simple as a category with finitely many objects requires stupid amounts of type-level boilerplate.