Early, strong reader here. Off-the-charts spatial reasoning, as measured by tests.
Terrible at math, I hate it and feel dyslexic trying to read most mathematical writing. I excelled at it in elementary school, then quickly came to feel frustratingly stupid at it as it became less about algorithms (more on that in a bit...) and all about equations and abstract stuff with unknown applications.
However, programming was natural and easy to pick up. I've repeatedly had to take more time convincing myself I actually understand some supposedly "hard" thing, like pointers or recursion, than it took to learn them in the first place, because they were in fact very easy to understand so I kept second-guessing myself—"I must not get it, because that was easy". I've been the go-to guy for "hard" and "low-level" problems basically everywhere I've worked.
What I've noticed is that when I must read math, the only way I can get any headway is to turn everything into steps, through which some example values may pass and affect one another. I have to turn it all into algorithms. Algorithms, I can get. Attempts to express meaning through equations and proofs, no, I have to painstakingly turn every single boundary between every symbol into a step and "walk through" it to have any hope of understanding it, and once I do, this new understanding only barely illuminates the original representation.
I think programming clicked for me because, as typically encountered and taught, it's very heavy on algorithms and very light on other varieties of mathematical presentation. Plus, having so very much more context available about what variables represent and what routines do, than a jumble of letters and symbols. FFS, if we say Perl is line noise, what's mathematical writing? Straight gibberish from a brain-wrecked Cthulhu cultist? Perl's the clearest thing in the world by comparison!
... where I do run into trouble is languages with "mathy" syntax, where the idiomatic style favors single-letter variables and accomplishing-things-by-asserting-equality. I can't read Haskell to save my life. Put the same supposedly-tricky concepts (monads, type classes) in any more-ordinary language, and it's easy, but when I tried to learn them using Haskell, I couldn't get anywhere at all. Shit, it takes me forever just to understand fizzbuzz-level programs written in Haskell.
Very interesting, as I am nearly the opposite. Bad spatial reasoning though pretty good at most other things. In school, geometry was fun and interesting - I enjoyed proofs. And I majored in English in college with a CS minor, so I think there must be a variety of in-roads for programming.
I think one "verbal" skill that has served me well is fast reading. When I had to read a 300 page novel once a week you learn how to skim for key elements, which is immensively useful for getting up to speed in a new codebase/language or locating a bug.
Same but I am literally math dyslexic (formal diagnosis of dyscalculia).
It prevented me from having a CS degree, I was unable to complete the math courses, but as far as actual programming and "software engineering" goes (design, etc) it's never hindered me. I can work out the logic and I let the computer do the math.
Edit: I'm downvoted below zero for this comment. I don't know what people are so offended by?
Yeah, to be clear, I'm not diagnosed with anything like that, and am only likening the experience to what I imagine it's like for dyslexics of humans language as a ready metaphor—meanwhile, the concepts aren't hard for me, like, a lot of people with no diagnosis of anything fall off the math-wagon right around the time operations on fractions are introduced, but the concepts have always posed no trouble to me and I breezed through early potential trip-ups like that. The style of presentation, specifically, is what gives me such a hard time and is what makes trying to approach even fairly easy "real" mathematics so hard for me.
> It prevented me from having a CS degree, I was unable to complete the math courses, but as far as actual programming and "software engineering" goes (design, etc) it's never hindered me. I can work out the logic and I let the computer do the math.
This is what's wild to me: I have a long, successful career in a "STEM" field that's allegedly math-heavy, while being practically incapable of working with math. Like, it's never even been slightly a problem. I can't relate at all to characterizations of programming as heavy on math. It's never been my experience of it, and at this rate, probably never will be. If it were, I'd for-sure be in a different job.
They probably suspect you to be a slow coder who writes code with bad abstractions because they percieve the maths skills as how one does things in software engineering.
Terrible at math, I hate it and feel dyslexic trying to read most mathematical writing. I excelled at it in elementary school, then quickly came to feel frustratingly stupid at it as it became less about algorithms (more on that in a bit...) and all about equations and abstract stuff with unknown applications.
However, programming was natural and easy to pick up. I've repeatedly had to take more time convincing myself I actually understand some supposedly "hard" thing, like pointers or recursion, than it took to learn them in the first place, because they were in fact very easy to understand so I kept second-guessing myself—"I must not get it, because that was easy". I've been the go-to guy for "hard" and "low-level" problems basically everywhere I've worked.
What I've noticed is that when I must read math, the only way I can get any headway is to turn everything into steps, through which some example values may pass and affect one another. I have to turn it all into algorithms. Algorithms, I can get. Attempts to express meaning through equations and proofs, no, I have to painstakingly turn every single boundary between every symbol into a step and "walk through" it to have any hope of understanding it, and once I do, this new understanding only barely illuminates the original representation.
I think programming clicked for me because, as typically encountered and taught, it's very heavy on algorithms and very light on other varieties of mathematical presentation. Plus, having so very much more context available about what variables represent and what routines do, than a jumble of letters and symbols. FFS, if we say Perl is line noise, what's mathematical writing? Straight gibberish from a brain-wrecked Cthulhu cultist? Perl's the clearest thing in the world by comparison!
... where I do run into trouble is languages with "mathy" syntax, where the idiomatic style favors single-letter variables and accomplishing-things-by-asserting-equality. I can't read Haskell to save my life. Put the same supposedly-tricky concepts (monads, type classes) in any more-ordinary language, and it's easy, but when I tried to learn them using Haskell, I couldn't get anywhere at all. Shit, it takes me forever just to understand fizzbuzz-level programs written in Haskell.