Item — HN Reader

As a functional programmer myself, I have the same confusion.

As best I can tell, category-theory a cargo-cult thing ("I want to look like the type of engineer who CARES about monoids [because if I use words you don't know I'm smart]" much in the same way hipsters claimed vinyl sounds better).

I'd like to be wrong about this, but I've already met a handful of "phonies" who rant and rave about this stuff, but when I ask them "How does labeling an array a monad help me?" or even "Is a hash-map a monad?" they are completely stuck.

Label the string as a functor and think about lifting the array into the string functor and doing string manipulation to change it to a dict, then lift it back into a dict type.

String manipulations of a lifted type in "string space" can be faster and more efficient then actually manipulating it in "type space"