You said "It has applications in physics and is widely used in computation". Category theory is not widely used by those who program computers and thus produce computation in them.
> I will however claim that, despite being unnecessary in principle, quite a bit more than 0.01% of code executed globally did make use of category theoretic abstractions because they are so useful (depending on how you measure this of course). Pretty much any program written for .NET and Scala makes use of monadic composition.
And like clockwork, you provide the bog-standard argument for why knowing category theory is important: you point out how many people productively write software without knowing anything about category theory (or even abstract algebra).
Saying that people use category theory to write software without knowing it is like saying they use Maxwell's Laws to write software: so reductive it loses all relevance to productive conversation. That's bad, unless your goal is to make the conversation unproductive.
You said "It has applications in physics and is widely used in computation". Category theory is not widely used by those who program computers and thus produce computation in them.
> I will however claim that, despite being unnecessary in principle, quite a bit more than 0.01% of code executed globally did make use of category theoretic abstractions because they are so useful (depending on how you measure this of course). Pretty much any program written for .NET and Scala makes use of monadic composition.
And like clockwork, you provide the bog-standard argument for why knowing category theory is important: you point out how many people productively write software without knowing anything about category theory (or even abstract algebra).
Saying that people use category theory to write software without knowing it is like saying they use Maxwell's Laws to write software: so reductive it loses all relevance to productive conversation. That's bad, unless your goal is to make the conversation unproductive.