

On Functors - pkrumins
http://catonmat.net/blog/on-functors

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kazuya
Uses in Haskell and ML seem to follow its math origin, but why in C++ they
have come to call it functor?

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sid0
Because functor is kinda-sorta a portmanteau of _function object_ and people
wanted to sound clever, I guess.

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dagw
I always thought it was 'FUNCTion operatOR".

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mahmud
In C++ it's customary to call a constructor "ctor"; they probably thought
"function constructor, riight, functor".

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Periodic
At least these words aren't used in colloquial English. Physics has the
problem that it tries to describe many things in terms of fairly regular words
like energy and wave, when they really aren't quite the same as the non-
physics use of those words. It has been the source of much undergraduate
confusion over the centuries.

A problem with using esoteric terms is that it can be hard to find two people
who have the exact same definition of them, and different fields will have
different definitions for the same term. They also raise the barrier to entry
when there is a full vocabulary to learn in addition to new meanings.

I'm not sure if we should keep overloading terms or try to come up with new
silly words for everything. I'm not sure what to think of functors, but in my
head they are always homomorphisms.

