> Also, the distance from "hello world" to "use your coding skills creatively" is really high, and a lot of people just bail before they get to that goal. I ag

> Also, the distance from "hello world" to "use your coding skills creatively" is really high, and a lot of people just bail before they get to that goal. I agree. When I got into programming as a teenager in the 90s, you could pretty quickly go from having fun with IBM Logo, to learning Turbo Pascal, to writing an application in Delphi that, e.g. your uncle running a small business can get actual use out of. It's probably not like that any more. What you get out of your effort is probably a narrower specialization now than you would have gotten back then, or, conversely, you'd have to put in a lot more effort to become similarly versatile as you would have been back then.