In this episode I argue that intuition is more rigorous than precisely defined arguments, such as those constructed using mathematics. I talk about the cost of precision in real-world situations, offer an approach to formalize intuition, and suggest that when it comes to establishing the connection between our ideas and reality we should always let intuition lead.

Category theory may strike you as intimidating, but trust us, you can (and after this episode, are probably itching to) talk applicative functors and parser combinators over afterwork drinks. Listen in to learn why Esko and Antti – both of whom started programming with dynamically typed languages – are so into category theory right now that they see applications of it everywhere.

Guest

Antti Holvikari is endlessly fascinated by pure functional programming languages such as Haskell and PureScript. Software quality and personal productivity are two things he’s constantly improving.

Host

Esko Lahti is an engineer who always wanted to learn about category theory in practice – but never knew where to start. Then he met Antti Holvikari.

Episode links

• PureScript: https://www.purescript.org/
• Parser Combinators, a Walkthrough: https://hasura.io/blog/parser-combinators-walkthrough/
• fp-ts: https://github.com/gcanti/fp-ts
• io-ts: https://github.com/gcanti/io-ts
• Algebraic Data Types: https://dev.to/gcanti/functional-design-algebraic-data-types-36kf
• Discriminated Unions in TypeScript: https://basarat.gitbook.io/typescript/type-system/discriminated-unions
• Maybe Not, a talk by Rich Hickey: https://youtu.be/YR5WdGrpoug

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More about the structured recusion scheme known as the catamorphism.  Basic idea of functors.

Review of basic application of category theory for functional programming.  Recursion schemes are combinators that let you write point-free recursions.

A few very basic ideas of categories and combinators.  Also, the problem of understanding very concise code.

Relation of point-free functional programming to category theory.