Being a good programmer requires thinking about things that, whether you realize it or not, are math problems. Things like managing complexity, or analyzing a program to understand what it even does. You can get pretty far just with a strong intuition, but stripped of all the syntax and culture around programming, what you're dealing with is, like, graph theory, and combinatorics, and stuff. If you recognize the concepts then you can reason about systems at a higher level and save yourself a lot of trial and error.

Or: You don't necessarily have to take math classes to be a good programmer, but the skills that differentiate a good software engineer from an LLM (previously 'code monkey') happen to correspond to things that mathemeticians would recognize and could give you a word for. This CoRecursive episode comes to mind: https://corecursive.com/050-sam-ritchie-portal-abstractions-...