Sure, I'm not going to argue with the research's applicability to learning in general, but I think that programming is a clear exception. The majority of the be

Sure, I'm not going to argue with the research's applicability to learning in general, but I think that programming is a clear exception. The majority of the best programmers in the world learned what they did in a mostly self-directed way. This is unique in comparison to the vast majority of other fields. For a while, there was a counterargument to be made that that was because of the relatively modern invention of programming, but this is clearly not the cause anymore - the first CS diploma was awarded in 1953, and now in 2020 you can get a CS bachelor's everywhere from liberal arts colleges to online. Go to those CS bachelor's students and you'll find that of the best, the majority were competent programmers before starting their degree. > I was taught via assignment how to open a file, and read and write to it. As well as how to implement a bubble sort. And I learned those, as millions of programmers, on my own - through documentation, and Google, and so on. That said, I certainly don't think that the _only_ way to be good is to be self taught. I have met people who went to university with zero prior CS knowledge, and they ended up excellent programmers. But to be entirely honest, that is a small population. It's an uncomfortable topic for universities - nobody wants to sell an expensive degree to become a programmer, with the prerequisite that you're already a programmer - but my university did admit that the students that were already programmers before starting did significantly better in every way.