Lambda the Ultimate

The old .Z compress format is, as far as I know, Unix-only, and plain postscript lost the popularity battle about a dozen years ago. I find it amusing how many folk in academia think that .ps is still a reasonable format in which to publish papers. Do they realize to what extent they are reducing their audience by failing to provide HTML and/or PDF versions?

Yes, I know about the Ghostscript free .ps viewer, but its usability is quite poor compared with Adobe's Acrobat reader.

You've still made a fair point though. Lyx can output a number of formats, (this looks like a Lyx document), so it makes sense to output a variety in order to be "all things to all men".

The bar for understanding computer science concepts based on category theory is raised pretty high, for those of us with limited experience of doing formal mathematics. I think it's a shame that these concepts aren't more widely understood - personally I'm ashamed of being so little able to understand them - as some of them seem very useful. I wonder whether they're capable of popularisation? Category theory may perhaps be irreducibly hard, but is bisimilarity by itself really that difficult to understand? The idea of an interface as a functor in a coalgebra may not come "naturally" to many working programmers, but that surely doesn't mean that it should not come at all. After all, VB programmers can be taught to love anamorphisms - without even knowing that they are doing so...

Actually, I don't believe that category theory is fundamentally any harder to understand than any other abstract math.

There are two problems with it that make it seem harder: 1. We aren't as familiar with it, because it isn't (yet) taught as basic math in schools. 2. Historically, it arose from very specialized applications in algebraic topology that turned out to have more generally applicable properties. For this reason, most texts use motivating examples taken from "heavy" maths that probably make the basic ideas seem more daunting to a normally educated person.

Some anecdotal evidence: I read an article in the paper a while back about a local mathematician (who is also a playwright) who has a side-line as a math tutor for children. Apparently he introduces them to basic CT with no difficulty.