Kittenlab... in 1988!

Learning
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I recently learned that a book which has a very similar approach to teaching category theory as kittenlab was written in 1988, using standard ML: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~david/categories/book/book.pdf. I’ve only skimmed through it so far, but it seems like it does a lot of similar things to Kittenlab/Catlab, like working through many constructions via algorithms in the category of finite sets. If you are programming-minded and want to learn about category theory, I’d suggest taking a look!

Also, this is a great quote from the introduction:
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And all this in 1988! Feels like there was a brief dark age and we’re in a renaissance now.

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Not sure if you are interested in collecting older references applying or implementing category theory in programming languages, but anyhow here is an interesting paper I read implementing graph transformations via category theory using Java generics (parameterized types): Graph Transformation by Computational Category Theory | SpringerLink

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