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Well, Functor is a bit of a misnomer; it really should be called TypeEndofunctor. The short form was really adopted as a mischievous pun on the use of "functor" in the OOP community.



I don't think TypeEndofunctor conveys any additional information when discussing a Haskell typeclass.

> The short form was really adopted as a mischievous pun on the use of "functor" in the OOP community.

Citation needed.


I should note that naming things with mischievous puns certainly wasn't beyond early Haskellers - that's the origin of `return` as a name for part of the Monad interface (since quasi-deprecated in favor of `pure`).

I just have never heard that allegation about `functor`, which seems to have been taken directly from mathematics that predate any notion of function object. It's possible that OO programmers and the mathematicians both borrowed it from the same source (it seems to have originated in linguistics).




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