You sound like someone who hasn't programmed much in a real-life scenario. Programming is far from being black and white as mathematics can be. From my own expe

You sound like someone who hasn't programmed much in a real-life scenario. Programming is far from being black and white as mathematics can be. From my own experience, programming is a mash of creative arts and psychology with a mathematics flavor . Most of the time, a programmer is just calling other people's API (which is unfortunate, in my humble opinion). So, what is the usual skill usage of a programmer? 50% Knowing the programming language you use and its libraries. 20% Communication. 10% Debugging efficiently. 10% Creativity and taste. 10% Algorithms and mathematics. Of course, these percentages depends on what you're doing -- e.g., a programmer working on a numerical-analysis application will need mathematics much more often than the average web-developer.