(1) I don't understand how the programmer wasting 6 months relates to my example. (2) I don't believe you know what math is/isn't, calculating missile trajectories is just one way of doing math. Math is not the same thing as Arithmetic. Also, depending on the type of plugin, math can be quite a useful tool. For starters, if you're playing with Facebook's graph api, knowing about graph theory can be quite handy.
