Rich Hickey has been mentioning how design is both composition (like stratified design) but also decomposition. Taking things apart is just as tricky as putting them together again. The primitives of your lowest abstraction layer is very important here. If they are already entangled you'll be in pain when trying to compose the higher layers. The hard part is to find the primitives of each layer, which I don't think can always done easily by just thinking and modeling. The code has to be written, explored and felt, while entropy takes its course. In some cases we can avoid that, by learning concepts, from other fields, that relate to our problem (often mathematics, but can be any).
Correct me if I am wrong: You are not proposing that category theory is unusable for design, but that the focus should be on the desired functionality instead of stylistic choices, of which category theory is counted amongst? I am a mathematician myself and know a bit of category theory, so I dont get why one would object to using categories for making abstract designs, since this is exactly what category theory is good at in Math. It doesnt tell you anything about the content of the subject of inquiry only about its bare schemata or structure. This is the primary usefulness of categories as an abstraction.
Rich Hickey has been mentioning how design is both composition (like stratified design) but also decomposition. Taking things apart is just as tricky as putting them together again.
The primitives of your lowest abstraction layer is very important here. If they are already entangled you'll be in pain when trying to compose the higher layers.
The hard part is to find the primitives of each layer, which I don't think can always done easily by just thinking and modeling. The code has to be written, explored and felt, while entropy takes its course. In some cases we can avoid that, by learning concepts, from other fields, that relate to our problem (often mathematics, but can be any).
Correct me if I am wrong: You are not proposing that category theory is unusable for design, but that the focus should be on the desired functionality instead of stylistic choices, of which category theory is counted amongst?
I am a mathematician myself and know a bit of category theory, so I dont get why one would object to using categories for making abstract designs, since this is exactly what category theory is good at in Math. It doesnt tell you anything about the content of the subject of inquiry only about its bare schemata or structure. This is the primary usefulness of categories as an abstraction.