This is good advice for programmers who want to become better mathematicians. That seems to me to be distinct from wanting to be better at applying mathematics

This is good advice for programmers who want to become better mathematicians. That seems to me to be distinct from wanting to be better at applying mathematics to programming problems. In the same way that wanting to be a better gardener is distinct from wanting to understand the aspects of gardening that will help you write programs relevant to that domain, with the obvious caveat that mathematics-related knowledge is relevant to a much wider range of problems people try to solve using software than gardening-related knowledge. In school I appreciated the sorts of classes that stressed proof the most, like topology or real analysis 2, because they made me a better mathematician. When programming, I am frequently glad that I took some upper level math class, but generally for reasons unrelated to whether I've actually done mathematics in that area. For instance, I could take advantage of the equivalence of the square metric and the Manhattan metric in a 2-space (up to a 45 degree rotation of the space) regardless of whether my topology class had emphasized proofs. The attitude portrayed as absurd in the article ("I don't want to write or read proofs, just use theorems") doesn't seem that far off from one that would work pretty well. The main issue with that attitude is the belief that a large body of theorems can be understood without understanding any of their proofs. Programmers don't need to be able to write proofs that aren't extremely trivial, but people who want to apply ideas from some area of mathematics probably need to understand it in a deeper way than memorizing theorems.