On 13/12/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Purely and simply, categories are useful for many things they weren't designed for or intended to do. Remember, they were a cute hack invented by Magnus a couple of years ago in the face of some pretty serious skepticism.
To give credit where credit is due, categories were actually invented a decade ago by Stan Silver for the WikiWikiWeb [1]. The difficulties of indicating "isness" and hierarchical category structure have been a topic of much discussion ever since. [2,3]
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19961129234150/c2.com/cgi/wiki?AboutCategoriesAnd... [2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiIsNotaTree [3] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LimitsOfHierarchies