While I use functors, applicatives and monads all the time in Haskell, I have no idea what half of these symbols mean. Are these specific to category theory?
The problem is, it explains in a language for people that know category theory, rather than people that merely use functors, applicatives and monads in Haskell
Indeed we could say that those programming interfaces don't need a lot of category theory to understand. For example, in Java a functor would be called Mappable (and actually it seems there is such a thing defined in some libs)