That 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,

That 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.)