TRS-80 CoCo BASIC and in high school formally educated with Turbo Pascal 5.5/6.0 Everything after - mostly "self" taught... As long as you count copious books

TRS-80 CoCo BASIC and in high school formally educated with Turbo Pascal 5.5/6.0 Everything after - mostly "self" taught... As long as you count copious books written by others as "self"-taught... PHP, Java, C/C++, Python, Javascript. Occasionally some of my friends would provide assistance when I needed help (they're busy people and I don't want to bother them much) - but in the end most of it was pounding code & failing ad nauseum. That experience is the only real way to understand. At least for me, I need the experience, not just the theory. But the experience alone misses a lot of underpinning - so reading theory helps back up and solidify what I do know and help reason about things and why they are going wrong. I dub the "Throw everything and see what works" : The Wacky Wallwalker Method. I should note I have never been employed as a professional programmer and this is probably a good thing.