I agree that it's not a clear-cut case, but programming is so much more than doing ifs and gotos. It seems that he learned most of his programming at 40 still.

I agree that it's not a clear-cut case, but programming is so much more than doing ifs and gotos. It seems that he learned most of his programming at 40 still. I did some programming with Turbo Pascal 3, but I hardly knew how to program, actually. I skipped all the hard parts (pointers, even the simplest data structures, refactoring general-purpose code into functions, using 3rd party libraries etc.) when I was a kid. There are more than one senses what it means to "know programming", I think me and the author knew as kids in one sense but not in another sense.