Dan Piponi on Nostr: Groups are ubiquitous in computing. We "use" one every time we add integers. But the ...

Groups are ubiquitous in computing. We "use" one every time we add integers. But the fact that you're working in a group doesn't mean you have to reify groups as a type/class/type class/whatever in your programming language. Your knowledge of groups is something *you* can use to reason about your code, it doesn't have to be in the code.

Similarly you can reason about variable assignment in C using monads, without any need for a monad type in C.

I can't find it now but I saw a toot pondering why graphs are so ubiquitous in computing and yet some languages have poor support for graphs. I just wanted to add that what I said above is a possible answer in many scenarios. The fact that I have a bunch of objects, and some of those objects point to other objects, and that therefore I have vertices and edges, doesn't mean I need a general purpose graph API - even if I go as far as to call my collection of objects a graph. (I've had a colleague do exactly this and I really felt it was a waste of developer time and computing resources.)