"Ben Tilly" <ben_tilly / hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:LAW2-F228erOc0Ne0Pa000010ca / hotmail.com...
...

 Since Till mentions categories it is probably worthwhile to point out  that
they far form useless in CS.  They are very important for the theoretical
foundations of FP and modern FP languages like Haskel use categorical
concepts like monads (invented by mathematicians decades earlier) even for
their IO-system.  By the way there is a striking similarity between  C++
meta template programming and FP programming IMO.

...
> I find it amazingly characteristic that Christian was
> asking what _concepts_ Ruby had to offer the world.
> Concepts are ways of applying meaning to problems,
> which is what analysts rely on for gaining intuition.
> But by and large algebraists do not produce concepts.
> They produce useful _formalisms_.

The amusing thing is that algebra is often much more down to earth than
analysis - that is to say algebraist often come up with constructive
algorithms you can (in principle) implement (for example the whole
encryption business).  If you want  to be polemic you might say that the
only thing an analysist ever does is proving  some (non)existence result
about a PDE living in some weird infinite dimensional space.;-)

...

Christoph