[cgag]

I don't know about "possible to express", but having learned Haskell, I see monoids everywhere.

In the SICP lectures, when Sussman teaches the class the word "predicate", he mentions that knowing the names of these things is important because "As any sorcerer will tell you, if you know the name of a spirit, you have power over it".[1]

If you only know C, you're unlikely to think in terms of map/filter/reduce. If you don't know Haskell, you're unlikely to think in terms of functors and monads. You may be vaguely aware of repeated patterns, but knowing you're looking at a monad gives you a lot more power to reason about it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlbMuv-jix8#t=12m50s