[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell for categorists

[Derek Elkins]

On Mon, 2007-07-16 at 14:23 +0000, Dave Bayer wrote:
> Miguel Mitrofanov <miguelimo38 <at> yandex.ru> writes:
> 
> > There are a lot of tutorials ensuring the reader that, although
> > Haskell is based on category theory, you don't have to know CT to use
> > Haskell. So, is there ANY Haskell tutorial for those who do know CT?
> 
> If you know category theory, it's a good bet that you're used to learning new
> subjects by reading research papers. You may even subscribe to the old acorn
> that it's best to read original sources.
> 
> One can't learn Haskell _just_ by reading papers, but it sure helps give
> perspective on how Haskell came to be, which in turn helps Haskell make more
> sense. Go read the original papers suggesting that category theory might be
> helpful in functional programming. 


> Then try to find monads in the classic
> category theory textbooks, and stare at the surrounding pages.

This is likely to be useless (in that particular connection).

But by all means, Moggi's Notions of Computation is good and anything by
Wadler can safely be assumed to be good in both quality in presentation.
In fact, bringing in aspects from another thread, I wonder how many
"newbies" never touch the research papers simply because they are
research papers and they assume them to be scary (a good dose of Wadler
or Peyton-Jones will dispel that).

As to the original question: there is nothing that's explicitly a
tutorial for categorists (why would there be?), but many papers do use
that perspective such as Jeremy Gibbons "Calculating Functional
Programs".