[analog31]

In my case it would be hard to separate cause and effect because math and proofs came before programming. "Back in my day," the public school that I attended had a K-12 math curriculum that included sets, proofs, and problems that had no answer. (You were supposed to write down "no answer"). I was kinda slow at memorizing my arithmetic, but proofs and weird stuff made math come alive for me.

Then my first programming class, in BASIC (in 1981), was taught by my high school math teacher, so there was a math perspective, plus my love of math probably biased my interests in programming. Today, I'm not employed as a programmer per se, but use programming and math as problem solving tools as a physicist.

I know programmers who are great at math, but most are not, and the ones who are take care of the math stuff in a team. Likewise with most engineers. So I'm hesitant to claim that math is a particular boon to learning programming. Rather, it is or it isn't, and that might influence what kind of programming you get into.

Like Joel Spolsky's article about programmers, I think there's a two humped distribution in terms of ability to grasp proof based math. If you discover by accident that you have a facility for it, then you might just try a few more courses because it's a boatload of fun.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-f...