Unless you have natural intuition or memorizing skills that make high school math easy for you, it's for many kids a negative experience due to the combination of a bad curriculum and teachers who are not skilled pedagogically. School math is the number one reason why so many kids learn to dislike it, and programming is the field that made me love and appreciate math for what it really is, while I didn't like it too much in school. With better teachers and curriculum I'm sure I would have appreciated it much earlier.