| Hey there! I'm the author, so I suppose I ought to address this :) First I'll say that I absolutely get this head-banging-on-desk feeling of no progress. Monads got me like that for a while but F-Algebras/recursion schemes got me like that much more, so make sure you keep your distance from them haha. I'm sorry to have contributed to your frustration. It actually sounds like you've grasped monads quite well. flatMap is the essence. I won't try to explain it though, because I know that's not what you're looking for, and I don't want to contribute to your frustration even more! I will say that my usual readership includes a lot of people who like designing type systems for programming languages. Category theory helps make sure you don't make mistakes in this process, though there are other techniques of course. I also find it helps my ability to think formally a lot, which has helped me a ton in studying and discussing philosophy, a separate interest of mine. Hopefully you can see from my post that I didn't really make an effort to justify or explain category theory for regular programmers much. Category theory is overhyped for that use case. I personally really hate reading overly mathematical Haskell code!! But if you just enjoy math or philosophy or learning or thinking, I hope you can have some fun with the beauty of these ideas. And since authoring the post I've added a wiki https://ryanbrewer.dev/wiki that can give more accessible background on things like monoids. I could be wrong but I don't think I mentioned a monoid of endofunctors or flatMap a single time in the post. I did mention monads, as an example of natural transformations, but completely from the perspective of beautiful math, not from a programming perspective at all. And once you learn about adjunctions, monads get even more gorgeous! https://ryanbrewer.dev/wiki/adjunction But all of this math takes a ton of patience. I'm someone who loves programming because the feeling of solving a hard bug is exhilarating and satisfying. The emotional payoff is bigger the longer it takes, and math is the same way for me. Don't beat yourself up about it, and don't feel bad if category theory just isn't helpful or enjoyable for you and your particular way of thinking! :) |
I think GP was just quoting a meme there. See also [0], where the meme is said [1] to originate.
[0]: https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438586