In my experience, people who were taught programming in uni are the ones who know fewer languages. I suspect it's due to the amount of money Microsoft put (stil

In my experience, people who were taught programming in uni are the ones who know fewer languages. I suspect it's due to the amount of money Microsoft put (still puts?) into making sure that C# is popular in that space. I studied maths, but informatics was in the same department and there was a lot of stuff funded by Microsoft and everyone around was programming in C#. Another popular university nearby produced mostly Java devs, judging from the people I got to know on the job coming from there. My university also had some courses with Smalltalk, OCaml etc., but these courses were not obligatory, and more geared towards people who are actively interested in programming languages. Self-taught programmers on the other hand more often have the intrinsic curiosity and motivation to learn those topics. Also diving deep into topics is their strength, since the uni counterparts often know the names of concepts, but after a while it's quite clear that this knowledge of names is rarely coupled with familiarity with the topics they represent. I'm sure just knowing the names of things gets you far when you want to pass an exam, but for actual work it's scarcely different from knowing nothing at all. As Feynman said, there's a big difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. Now, those are just generalizations from experience. I've also met plenty of counterexamples in both groups.