[Haskell-cafe] Article review: Category Theory

[Yitzchak Gale]

David House wrote:
> I've written a chapter for the Wikibook that attempts to teach some
> basic Category Theory in a Haskell hacker-friendly fashion.
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Category_theory

Very, very nice!

A few comments:

A few semicolons were missing in the do blocks
of the Points-free style/Do-block style table. I
fixed that. I think it would be simpler without the
do{} around f x and m - are you sure it's needed?

You wrote: "category theory doesn't have a notion
of 'polymorphism'". Well, of course it does - after
all, this is "abstract nonsense", it has a notion
of *everything*. But obviously we don't want to
get into that complexity here. Here is a first
attempt at a re-write of that paragraph:

Note: The function id in Haskell is 'polymorphic' -
it can have many different types as its domain
and range. But morphisms in category theory
are by definition 'monomorphic' - each morphism
has one specific object as its domain and one
specific object as its range. A polymorphic
Haskell function can be made monomorphic by
specifying its type, so it would be more
precise if we said that the Haskell function
corresponding to idA is (id :: A -> A).
However, for simplicity, we will ignore this
distinction when the meaning is clear.

It is nice that you gave proofs of the >>= monad
laws in terms of the join monad laws. I think
you should state more clearly that the two
sets of laws are completely equivalent.
(Aren't they?) Maybe give the proofs in the opposite
direction as an exercise.

Regards,
Yitz