This comment resonates with me so much. I remember learning how to program, as an adult, and having an epiphany about all those times my teachers wrote f(x) and

This comment resonates with me so much. I remember learning how to program, as an adult, and having an epiphany about all those times my teachers wrote f(x) and then proceeded to write some hodgepodge of numbers and letters. No one had ever explained why I would ever need some function for x to spit out something else and so I was sort of lost from the very beginning when it came to any kind of high level math. Ditto for sets and pairs. Basically all of my math education was a complete waste until I learned a bit of computer programming and could play around with implementing the abstract concepts and relate those concepts to practical uses. Then suddenly it all made so much more sense!