848 karma · joined September 28, 2017
Rest assured, you absolutely do not need any category theory to be an effective functional programmer. Everything is a category because category theory is the most general formulation of algebra. But you don't need to know categories for any of it. Not even for monads.
It's like trying to use calculus of variationsnto find the area of a triangle. You can so it, but it's pointlessly overcomplicated overengineering. Chasing after ever-higher abstractions when you only have one concrete case to abstract over, is the functional programmer's version of OO architecture astronautry.
"Old guy here is a low/mid level person after 20 years, so he clearly isn't a superstar. Young guy here is low/mid level person, so he has potential to be a superstar."
Hiring committees, smothered by the legal ass covering around race and sex discrimination, never even think twice about making this discriminatory argument. It's even officially enshrined in hiring plans as "expectation of trajectory", a rule that only applies to old people. And before you say "ok but that's a logical argument", it's exactly the same logically correct argument as the (illegal) "bases on my limited knowledge, a white/Chinese/male candidate I just met is more likely to be successful at this job than a black/Hispanic/female candidate".