Reddit mentions of An Invitation to Applied Category Theory: Seven Sketches in Compositionality

I'm in literally the same boat with you. Full time software engineer and I graduated almost a year ago.

I think two things motivate me to self-study:

1. It's something I enjoy
   
   
2. It's someting I'm excited to apply to some project (personal or professional)
   
   To a degree, 2 is kind of a subset of 1. Anyway, when I come home I just find an hour to set aside and work through a book, ebook, or video to develop the skill in question. Recently it's been this book. And someday's I just wanna play video games and be lazy. So I think a large part of it is understanding that it's a slow process for the most part.

It's a fair point; applied category theory is really in its infancy. For a long time, it was considered pretty inaccessible and obscure. I think that's starting to change, e.g. with some new pedagogically oriented books (Cheng, Fong-Spivak), new international conferences, new journal, etc. But it might take time.


The most successful application so far is certainly Haskell, OCAML, and other similar functional programming languages. These were built entirely on category-theoretic principles, and have become quite popular (Haskell is used at AT&T, Amgen, Apple, Bank of America, Facebook, Google, Verizon, etc.).


There are control theory researchers such as Paulo Tabuada, robotics researchers such as Aaron Ames and Andrea Censi, and others who have explicitly used category theory in their work. For-profit companies such as Kestrel, Statebox, R-Chain, Conexus, etc. all use category theory more or less explicitly.


Whether or not electrical engineers—or others of that sort—will use CT depends on whether there are enough interested parties who can drive it more deeply into that domain. So far, the work has been at a very surface level because category theorists have to "go to them" instead of them "coming to us". As category theorists, we don't know enough about the depths of these fields to make a direct and immediate impact without preparing the ground. It takes time and effort, and we need more people on the case.


But if we continue—and I think we will—my guess is that in the future, people will use category theory to learn lots of different fields and connect their knowledge from one to another. A major value proposition of category theory is its ability to transfer information and problem specification from one field to another. I think that will eventually be broadly useful.

You're welcome! But upon reflection, "Category Theory in Context," I think, presupposes too much background in abstract algebra to really qualify as "introductory." And I criminally overlooked An Invitation to Applied Category Theory: Seven Sketches in Compositionality! BTW, it's even available online.