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"Categories for the Working Hacker" by Philip Wadler
Strange Loop Conference
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.Philip Wadler's talk, Category Theory for the Working Hacker, is a nice little introduction: https://youtu.be/gui_SE8rJUM
⬐ NoneNone⬐ robertkrahn01Here are slides of an earlier version of the talk given at QConSF 2017: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/categories/qcon-...⬐ contravariantThis is the first time I've seen someone casually use "f;g" as notation for (reversed) function composition. I'm glad for it, but does anyone know how widespread this notation is?⬐ agumonkeyI thought it would be an old talk but it's from Strange Loop 2018* plays
⬐ BucketSortSome background for the uninitiated, this is Lambda Man, or Philip Wadler. One of the core contributors to Haskell. He also introduced monads to Haskell, which has had a huge impact on functional programming in general (https://ncatlab.org/nlab/files/WadlerMonads.pdf). His home page has so many functional programming treasures: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/. His most recent book is "Programming Language Foundations in Agda", which is available for free: https://plfa.github.io/. I have no affiliation, just a fan.⬐ totalperspectivThanks for sharing that book! Super cool!
AD is important to understand for ML practitioners in the same way as compilers are important to understand for programmers. You can get away without knowing all the details, but it helps to understand where your gradients come from. However this paper is probably not be a good place to start if you're new to AD. If you want a better introduction, here are a few good resources:Autodidact is a pedagogical implementation of AD: https://github.com/mattjj/autodidact
A nice literature review from JMLR: http://www.jmlr.org/papers/volume18/17-468/17-468.pdf
This paper reinterprets AD through the lens of category theory, an abstraction for modeling a wide class of problems in math and CS. It provides a language to describe these problems in a simple and powerful way, and is the foundation for a lot of work in functional programming (if you're interested in that kind of stuff). There was a thread on HN recently that discusses why category theory is useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18267536
"Category Theory for the Working Hacker" by Philip Wadler is a great talk if you're interested in learning more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gui_SE8rJUM
Also recommend checking out Bartosz Milewski's "Category Theory for Programmers": https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf