You know the meme with the normal distribution where the far right and the far left reach the same conclusion for different reasons, and the ones in the middle have a completely different opinion?

So on the far right you have people on von Neumann who says "In mathematics we don't understand things". On the far left you have people like you who say "me no mats". Then in the middle you have people like me, who say "maths is interesting, let me do something I enjoy".

To use an example from functional programming, I could say:

- "A monad is basically a generalization of a parameterized container type that supports flatMap and newFromSingleValue."

- "A monad is a generalized list comprehension."

- Or, famously, "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"

The basic idea, once you get it, is trivial. But the context, the familiarity, the basic examples, and the relationships to other ideas take a while to sink in. And once they do, you ask "That's it?"

So the process of understanding monads usually isn't some sudden flash of insight, because there's barely anything there. It's more a situation where you work with the idea long enough and you see it in a few contexts, and all the connections become familiar.

(I have a long-term project to understand one of the basic things in category theory, "adjoint functors." I can read the definition just fine. But I need to find more examples that relate to things I already care about, and I need to learn why that particular abstraction is a particularly useful one. Someday, I presume I'll look at it and think, "Oh, yeah. That thing. It's why interesting things X, Y and Z are all the same thing under the hood." Everything else in category theory has been useful up until this point, so maybe this will be useful, too?)

Your rant would be akin to this if the sides are reversed: "It's surprising how many different ways there are to describe the same thing. Eg: see all the notations for dictionaries (hash tables? associative arrays? maps?) or lists (vectors? arrays?).

You don't have "the manual" of programming languages. "

Do you know the reason for that? The reason is that those problems are open and easy to understand. For the rest of open problems, you need to be need expertise to even understand the problem statement.

If we are already venturing outside of scientific realm with philosophy, I'm sure fields of literature or politics are older. Especially since philosophy is just a subset of literature.