I learned programming before I learned algebra, and it made algebra seem like an old fashioned and slow waste of time. I could solve the same problems more quickly and naturally by writing a short program.
That put me off math for a long time. In retrospect I wish I had stuck with it to get to the more interesting parts. In the end though, having not done that, I’m not really sure that math and programming are interchangeable skills as some here are asserting.
Mathematics and programming are not interchangable, but programming is one form of expressing mathematics and giving context to seemingly meaningless numbers.
Personally, I /fucking hated/ math as a kid. The numbers were meaningless to me because nothing, neither the teachers nor the textbooks nor anyone/anything else, ever taught me what the numbers meant. "Solve for X and tell me what Y is" they said, "How many apples do you have if you hold one in each hand." they said. Pointless.
It was only after I got into programming, incidentally of my own self-taught volition, that all those numbers suddenly had meaning and I truly understood the value of math.
"54 / 36 = ?" is meaningless to me, but "screen_width / 2" and "screen_height / 2" to figure out the center point of a monitor do have meaning, and my mind was blown with a sudden astronomical understanding of the world.
Perhaps the most mind shattering moment was when programming made me realize I could apply math to things that aren't numbers:
"apple" + "orange" = "appleorange"
Mind. Fucking. Shattered.
So programming is amazing at teaching math, at giving math crucial context to keep a kid's mind interested, but teaching programming itself will not teach math.
That put me off math for a long time. In retrospect I wish I had stuck with it to get to the more interesting parts. In the end though, having not done that, I’m not really sure that math and programming are interchangeable skills as some here are asserting.