[justinmeiners]

Category theory is mostly useful for modeling computation theoretically and thus designing languages.

It's also not that helpful to learn unless you already know a lot of deeper math, like introductory algebraic topology, etc.

[eru]

I suspect the relation with algebraic topology is mostly an artifact of history.

[justinmeiners]

That is true, but it still provides tons of examples of functors such as fundamental group and homology.

These sorts of interesting functors are not common outside of graduate math.

[eru]

Yes. I think programming provides a lot of interesting examples of eg functors and other such structures.

Enough to build your intuition at least, and then start learning category theory from there. (And then try to use that knowledge to kick off some further investigation into the other areas of math that category theory historically comes from, if you are so interested.)

I think it's a bit like learning Spanish first and then Latin later. Vs learning Latin first and then some romance languages.