Knuth Predicts Monad Jargon

Knuth, predicting "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors": 194 D. E. KNUTH Of course you know that the theory of languages has by now become ulg_generalized so that it bears little relation to its practical origins. This is not bad in itself, although sometimes it reminds me of a satirical article published a few years ago by AUSTIN (1967); paraphrasing this article, we should not be surprised to find someday a paper entitled “On triply-degenerate prewaffles having no proper normal subwaffle with the pseudo-A₄ property, dedicated to A. B. Smith on his 19th birthday.” Sometimes theories tend to become very baroque! The tendency of modern mathematics to be ‘modern’ in the sense of ‘modern art’ has been aptly described in an extraordinary article by HAMMERSLEY (1968) which should be required reading for everyone.

A screenshot of a Jonathan Blow tweet overlays a passage from Donald Knuth discussing absurdly overgeneralized mathematical theories. The joke is that Knuth’s fictional, baroque paper titles predict the dense category-theory jargon of the phrase about monads and monoids. It is used as a reaction to extremely abstract or needlessly technical programming and mathematics discourse.

• @profunctor_io / 6305 2021-02-15