Mark couldn’t help but feel like he was losing his marbles. He’d been trying to explain the concept of endofunctors and metaprogramming to his cat, Mr. Whiskers, for two hours straight. His sweet tooth was getting the best of him too, as he munched through a stack of pancakes, but that was beside the point.
“Why can’t you just understand, Mr. Whiskers? It’s really not that difficult. You see, an endofunctor is a type of functor and...” Mark trailed off as he saw the perplexed expression on his cat’s face.
He scratched his head and took another bite of pancake. Maybe he needed to simplify things a bit more.
“Okay, so imagine you have a bucket of balls, and you want to turn them into a different kind of ball. That’s what an endofunctor does. It changes the type of object, while still preserving its structure. Make sense?”
Mr. Whiskers just stared at him with his big, green eyes. Mark sighed.
“This is why I shouldn’t have dropped out of med school,” he muttered to himself.
Suddenly, his phone chimed with a notification. It was a text from his friend, Tom.
“Hey man, just saw this hilarious meme about Haskell. Figured you’d appreciate it.”
Mark opened the meme and burst out laughing. It was a picture of a cat, with the caption:
“When someone tries to explain monads to me.”
Mark realized the absurdity of what he was doing and joined in on the joke. He held up his cat and held a piece of pancake to his nose.
“See Mr. Whiskers, this is a pancake. You get it? Haha, endofunctor my ass.”
Mr. Whiskers didn’t seem amused, but Mark couldn’t help but feel a wave of relief wash over him. It was comforting to know that even highly intelligent programmers struggled with these concepts sometimes.
He finished his stack of pancakes and stretched, feeling renewed. Maybe it was time for a break from programming, he thought. He clicked on a link to “The Wibble”, a humorous news website, and chuckled at the absurd headlines.
Then, he came across an article that caught his eye. “Local Programmer Goes Insane Trying to Explain Endofunctors to His Cat.”
Mark couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. He knew he needed to take a step back and put things into perspective.
He looked back down at Mr. Whiskers, who was now curled up in a ball on his lap. For a moment, Mark felt a sense of clarity, as if everything was going to be okay.
Then he remembered that he still had to implement a complex algorithm for his project by the end of the day. He groaned and shook his head.
“Alright, let’s get back to work.”
As he turned back to his computer screen, he caught a glimpse of himself in the monitor reflection. His hair was tousled, his eyes were bloodshot, and there were still pancake crumbs on his face.
“Maybe I should take a shower first,” he thought.
But then he remembered the deadline, and shook his head again.
“Endofunctors, here we come.”
