That's a very interesting categorization. I would generally place myself in the 'electrical engineers' category. I usually code in Python, Javascript, or Java,

That's a very interesting categorization. I would generally place myself in the 'electrical engineers' category. I usually code in Python, Javascript, or Java, but I see those languages as essentially C or machine code with productivity enhancements like garbage collection, objects, closures, and lots of interoperable libraries. OTOH, I would also place myself somewhat in the 'mathematician' category because I see imperative code as functional code where each instruction is a function that takes the current machine state and some parameters and computes a new machine state. The new machine state is an input for the next instruction. When you see it that way, instruction pipelines in the CPU become very easy to comprehend: the CPU calculates one or more possible future machine states while waiting for a response from DRAM, then selects the correct state based on the response. Seeing it that way also reveals the main issue with imperative programming: the each instruction accepts too many inputs! Functional programming helps constrain the inputs so that it's easier to reason about what the code does and how it can change.