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I started programming at the age of 8, and went on to study CS at the age of 20. So, I count myself a self-taught programmer with a Master in computer science,
by Deestan 16y ago
I started programming at the age of 8, and went on to study CS at the age of 20. So, I count myself a self-taught programmer with a Master in computer science, and I have an opinion:
The formal education didn't teach me any skills I couldn't have picked up on my own.
It did however, teach me to ask questions I didn't know existed, lovely abstractions and a lot of useful theoretical concepts. Instead of constantly being surprised by things like "oh, wow, Java's static classes are really similar to python modules of free functions", I can clearly see that they are both manifestations of the same idea, but shaped differently by the language design. This makes it much easier and quicker to pick up new languages and technology.
- neilk 16y agoThat reminds me of an anecdote a friend of mine told me... she was studying computer science and this one guy in her class, when confronted with a new concept, would always ask "...but how would you do that in Visual Basic?" For him, Visual Basic was programming. Everything else had to be translated to VB for him to understand it. This is one of the pitfalls of being self-taught, at least if you only learn scripting languages. You don't see the forest for the trees. (This might be different for people who are self-taught with C, because it's so close to the machine, they instead might be asking the question "but how does the compiler translate that into a machine representation", which is a MUCH better question to ask.)