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Category Theory 1.1: Motivation and Philosophy

Bartosz Milewski · lecture · Watch on YouTube

Functional programmingPure mathematicsUniversity lectures & courses

What it is

The first lecture in Bartosz Milewski's category theory series for programmers. It covers the motivation and philosophy behind category theory and why composition matters for handling complexity.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN commenters repeatedly name it as the friendliest entry point to category theory for working programmers.

  • 11 people recommended it
  • 9 different months
  • 2 strong recommendations
  • first 2016, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “His presentation style is wonderful - i recommend the whole talk but this part starts at 37:20.”

    Great talk on motivation, composition, and handling complexity

    defaultcompany, 2019-10 · Strong recommendation · in “On the Weaknesses of the Mathematical Mind”

  2. “nothing beats articles and videos by Dr. Bartosz Milewski”

    Best articles and videos for imperative programmers

    phekunde, 2020-05 · Strong recommendation · in “Ask HN: How to be fluent in functional language speak?”

  3. “If you are interested in understanding the theory I really recommend this”

    Recommended to build foundation for the theory

    openfuture, 2017-01 · Recommendation · in “Why hasn't Haskell taken over the world? And the curious case of Go”

  4. “I think they are a very nice place to start learning these things.”

    Very nice place to start learning category theory

    snowcrshd, 2017-04 · Recommendation · in “A monoid is a category, a category is a monad, a monad is a monoid”

  5. “Those articles (and the videos ) are great”

    Great, though not needed to understand Haskell monads

    danidiaz, 2017-04 · Recommendation · in “From Monads to Machine Code”

  6. “I can recomend the video series of Bartosz Milewski”

    Series that finally began to clarify category theory

    nuriaion, 2017-04 · Recommendation · in “Category Theory, Syntactically (2016)”

  7. “I suppose I should start (re)working my way through”

    Commenter plans to work through it to become a better engineer

    yanowitz, 2018-02 · Recommendation · in “Monadic I/O and Unix shell programming (2001)”

  8. “Bartosz Milewski's Category theory for programmer's”

    One of many favorite math video lectures

    philzook, 2019-01 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: How to self-study mathematics from the undergrad through graduate level?”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: category theory, haskell, composition, functional programming, monads

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