I'm not sure where you're getting this. moralestapia never said he didn't understand it. (In fact, in a parallel branch of the comment tree, he said that he did understand it.) He said that if you use category theory on a project, now nobody on your team understands the code. But that "you" probably doesn't mean "if you are on my team and do that, I won't understand it". It probably means more like "if one uses category theory", that is, if you use it on your team, this is the result, if I use it on my team, the same result happens.
And if you mean dahart, he said (or at least implied) that he didn't understand geometric algebra, but he didn't say anything about understanding category theory.
My email recorded a more hostile version of your original comment before you edited it. I will post it here:
>moralestapia never said he didn't understand it. In fact, in a parallel branch of the comment tree, he said that he did understand it. Your post is at best a misreading of what he said, and at worst a deliberate slander.
I don't like comments that accuse me of slander, even as a possibility.
I'm going to be frank with you. HN is a big place with thousands of users, I never encounter the same user twice... but you seem to appear regularly out of nowhere and reply to my comments. I may be wrong and that you happen to be just everywhere but your responses seem like you're just hunting me down to reply to me.
If you are doing that please stop. Additionally I just don't like you or care for your opinions in general because of the above hostility. So even if you aren't creeping around just to reply to my comments, I'd appreciate it, if the next time you see my name just ignore the comment and move on. My comments are not addressed to you and they have nothing to do with you.
Yes, that comment was too hostile, and I apologize. It was not up very long; I thought better of it almost immediately.
> ... but you seem to appear regularly out of nowhere and reply to my comments. I may be wrong and that you happen to be just everywhere but your responses seem like you're just hunting me down to reply to me.
Bluntly, I notice you most often by seeing a comment that I think is too harsh of a reply to someone else. I don't like it when I see that. (You complained about me doing so to you, with some justice, so you should understand the feeling.) I try to give you the benefit of the doubt, because I have the impression that English is not your first language. But it seems to me that you often interpret peoples' words in a very negative way, which their actual words do not seem to me to deserve. I get annoyed when people do that (not just you). I try to speak up when I see people getting grief that they didn't deserve (again, not just when you're involved).
> So even if you aren't creeping around just to reply to my comments, I'd appreciate it, if the next time you see my name just ignore the comment and move on. My comments are not addressed to you and they have nothing to do with you.
Post on a public forum, get public replies. If you post here, you don't get to control who can reply and who can't.
Imagine you're in a public place and some stranger is following you around and replying to your comments constantly day in and day out. It's annoying and creepy af.
I can't order you to back off. But imagine this. You are approaching me every day in a public place and I turn and face you and I tell you to back off. This is the level of threat you are inciting. Your presence is not welcome and the environment is now extremely hostile. I can't call the police on you in a forum but if this were a public place it would be justified.
I am telling you to back off. It's your choice whether you do so, but I ask you to check your actions and really think about what you are starting here.
I find it highly unlikely that you are just coincidentally encountering me all the time out of nowhere. I'm dead serious. I don't like you, I don't care for your comments, back off.
I am not deliberately following you on HN. I find you mostly on threads about computer languages; I visit a number of other topics, whenever I find them interesting.
I am not trying to harass you or stalk you. But I'm going to keep reading what interests me. If I see what you wrote and I think it's wrong, I'm going to reply. If that upsets you, I'm sorry that you're upset, but I do not consider that reason for me to change what I read or who I reply to.
The one thing I can offer is that I will try to be careful not to over-react when I reply to you. I'll try to be careful to be moderate in my words.
> I can't call the police on you in a forum but if this were a public place it would be justified.
Even here, you can email dang if you think I'm seriously out of line. Feel free to do so if you think it's justified. I'm completely serious. If I actually am at fault, I easily may fail to see it in myself. If dang thinks that it warrants telling me to back off, I will take that very seriously.
I'll tentatively believe you for now that you aren't stalking me. But you are borderline creeping me the hell out.
>If dang thinks that it warrants telling me to back off, I will take that very seriously.
Are you serious? The person that is feeling harassed is telling you to back off and you are getting in his face and saying let dang decide? I don't think you're serious if you are actually inviting me to escalate this issue. If you reply to any one of my other posts I definitely will request his aid to moderate. BACK OFF.
His initial post said the "team" doesn't understand it so I took it to encompass "him" as part of the team. My post is in response to that.
Clearly his subsequent post says he does understand CT so I'm in error on that part.
Either way the "team" not understanding it, does not preclude it from being right. CT does not overcomplicate things. It just allows you to understand a program differently so you can decompose your program into smaller pieces or take a different path.
Saying CT complicates things is like saying number theory complicates numbers. Number theory is numbers and CT looks very much like a good theoretical framework for program organization. In other words CT looks like a formal theory for the design of programs.
We aren't at a spot where we can concretely say this, but practitioners of CT and programming are enamored with CT because it looks this way.
Overall, his complaints point to a lack of understanding despite his claim.
He's scoffing at something he doesn't understand. That is 100% ignorance.
This is entirely different from scoffing at something over complicated and that you do understand.