Theory of category

Summary

This post is based on “A pragmatic introduction to category theory” talk where were presented definitions of the most used term from theory category defined from the pragmatic perspective. I encourage all of you to watch slides or presentation.

Why should we bother at all?

Category theory gives us a more in-depth understanding of our code. Precisely it gives us information about how things compose together. We reason by composition and abstraction.

Defined terms of `Theory of category` in this talk

• What is the category?

It is transformation from one object to another A->B

• The most used category’s rules
  • Identity law
  • Composition Low: ability to combine transformation
  • Associativity: operations can be grouped arbitrarily

• monoid = category with 1 object

It meets following rules:
Identity : n o id == id o n == n
Composition : forall x, y => x o y
Associativity : x o (y o z) == (x o y) o z

• functor = category in a box (e.g. Option from F#, Future from Scala, Try, List, Either) where box means that values are lifted to some context.

It meets following rules:

Identity : map(id) == id
Composition : map(g o f) == map(g) o map(f)
Associativity: map(h o g) o map(f) == map(h) o map(g o f)
*applicative = combine more boxes into one

• monad = fuse two boxes together = it is a monoid in the category of endofunctors

References

• Slides
• The same presentation from different conference