> You don't need to know category theory. You just need to understand a few things that came from it, like `Maybe`, which is the most obviously useful and trivially easy monad. Just forget about the fact that it's a monad and any general rules about monads and just learn how to use `Maybe`.

I didn't convey my question clearly. What I'm wondering is how I should express programs, or part of them, using mathematical notation when I don't see them being mathematical in nature to begin with?

An example:

  def hello(name):
      if (name == "Bob"):
          print("Hello, " + name)
      else:
          print("Hello, World!")

How could I express this easily using mathematical notation?

It just feels weird that to convey this simple program on paper both I and the person I try to communicate with needs to have a grounding in category theory.

Hope you're able to understand my question. :)