Also, there are many kinds of self-taught programmers. Some are task-oriented learners* , and will learn CS concepts they encounter on the way to achieving thei

Also, there are many kinds of self-taught programmers. Some are task-oriented learners* , and will learn CS concepts they encounter on the way to achieving their underlying goal. (This seems to be the kind the article has in mind.) This has its problems. For example, rather than realizing that their problem is easily solved with parsing tools, they may just lean harder on the regular expressions they already know. Learning within a classroom setting would direct them to ideas they may not otherwise encounter, nudging them out of local maxima. Others self-learners try to get a full overview of whatever niche they're working in. Perhaps they've been burned by missing concepts from purely task-oriented learning, or perhaps they find having some big picture understanding makes finding practical applications easier. (I fall into the latter.) One problem with this group is that learning everything by breadth-first search can take a while - I wrote a web server from scratch to figure out how web programming works, while some people would be content just going through a Rails tutorial or something. That kind of perpetual, open-ended research really adds up, though. * just making up terms here.