Thank you for the clarification! That is an accurate description of a typical autodidact's relationship to the field of interest (not currently contributing).

Thank you for the clarification! That is an accurate description of a typical autodidact's relationship to the field of interest (not currently contributing). Maybe that is the huge difference between autodidacts in physics (and mathematics and other hard sciences) and autodidacts in programming. You don't have to advance the field of computer science to be productive as a programmer.