I taught myself to program when I was 11, using GameMaker, which had this neat scripting language called GML that hooked into the editor to control things above and beyond the simple actions built in.
Learning about functions and variables made algebra ezpz when we learnt it later on. Matrices were multidimensional arrays (I know, not quite the same in terms of maths, but hey I was young).
More importantly, programming taught me how to approach logical problems the correct way. I'm super thankful for it :)
> Matrices were multidimensional arrays (I know, not quite the same in terms of maths, but hey I was young).
In math, if something has all the properties a kind of object is defined to have, it is that kind of object. Mathematics is based on definitions, so things are what they are defined to be, no more, no less.
In fact, you can implement mathematical structures in terms of other mathematical structures, as Peano did when he defined numbers and basic arithmetic in terms of set theory:
Learning about functions and variables made algebra ezpz when we learnt it later on. Matrices were multidimensional arrays (I know, not quite the same in terms of maths, but hey I was young).
More importantly, programming taught me how to approach logical problems the correct way. I'm super thankful for it :)