Category theory foundations 1.0 — Steve Awodey

Summary: The talk is about C# primarily. It covers the notion of a category (objects and morphisms, in the form of C# objects and methods), functors, and monoids. For a more in-depths introduction - one that involves good stuff like the Yoneda lemma, natural transformations, and the strongly laxative monoidal functors -, you can check out Steve Awodei's CT lectures.

I'm going to be either infuriatingly unhelpful or give you something awesome to hang on to, so hear me out. I am a mathematician and spent most of my programming life with C and C++, started learning Haskell about three years ago and basically stayed at the stage you describe for quite a while. What helped me was change in approach, I don't even think of Haskell as programming language at this point, it's just something that makes maths more interactive. In essence, I am embracing von Neumann's "You don't understand mathematics, you just get used to it" as a pretty sane approach to Haskell. Maybe it's a generally looked down upon mistake, but worked for me and indeed allowed me to go past s…