Interestingly (I'm one of ther guys self-teaching as an adult), this is exactly how I'm learning. I'm doing a course that uses Jupyter to cover all of the major

Interestingly (I'm one of ther guys self-teaching as an adult), this is exactly how I'm learning. I'm doing a course that uses Jupyter to cover all of the major areas up to linear algebra. I also aced my Geometry class in high school exactly because of what you said: it gave me some of the flavor of proofs and "real math," which was fun and made me motivated. I remember at the time being sorely disappointed when no other math classes were like that again and figured it was some kind of lucky fluke. I think you're onto something, because teaching myself programming was precisely my backdoor into math. I remember a line in the Clause Shannon biography "A Mind at Play" that said he was essentially the same way: he wanted to apply his mathematics and understand the proofs/structure behind it, but essentially (as the title suggests) it was a form of play.