Why or why do so many people fail to learn programming?
Is it because they fail to see programming as calculation of data and instead see a black box that magically does things?
Or is it because they can't grasp the "strict" typing of a programming language?
What is it, /prog/, that makes programming so hard, even the introductory course seems so hard for people, even with languages like LISP or Python, and books like SICP?
People who don't understand math and compare it to religion are hilarious.
Theistic religions typically require accepting something as truth without any verifiable facts and usually plays on emotional cues to manipulate the person.
Mathemathics is a very useful tool/framework which starts with some premises and derives a lot of things from them, thus "If A, B and C are accepted as true (define the system in some way, with some axioms) -> (possibly an) infinity of true statements follow from those base ideas". A lot of processes in real life can be modeled very well by math, while certain things like computer science are basically just a branch of math as everything is certain and user-defined. What math tells you is if you have one system, it will behave in a certain way, and it gives you the tools to investigate it.
Our reality may itself be mathematical (and computable) at its very foundations given its consistency so far, however since we are part of this reality, there are fundamental limitations about our ability to measure things (since we are ourselves made of these 'things' (whatever the basic element of reality is, for example, in a hypothethical theory it could be n-dimensional strings), thus we are such a pattern in the world which can only interact with other patterns). The best we can do is obtain an isomorphic model of our reality which does not fail at any tests we can throw at it, and that will be good enough, at least until we can find a failure point (if at all), and if we do, we just have to adjust the model or make a new one.
It's a bit sad when people don't understand the true nature of information, mathematics and reality itself.