I suspect if you wrote some code to solve differential equations 12 years ago, and went back to that code today, you'd understand it without much hassle. This is the failure of maths as a language IMHO.
But you'd be looking at two different things. When looking at a math textbook on differential equations, you're looking at why a class of expressions constitutes a solution to a differential equation. Looking at code, all you'd get is the mechanical how something is computed, and you'd have to take it on faith that what was computed constituted the solution you were looking for.
That's not a fair comparison, since (it sounds like) the parent commenter's been coding for the last 12 years.
The analogy would be more like studying both, writing a formal type system for a programming language, then practising mathematics for twelve years, and still understanding the type system.
