I created a game in Actionscript 2.0 back in 2009. I started to program in around November of 2011. Being able to cobble together an app or what-have-you is v

I created a game in Actionscript 2.0 back in 2009. I started to program in around November of 2011. Being able to cobble together an app or what-have-you is very different from programming, I think. I would not call what I did back then programming. I even wrote a couple of follow-up games which used a tile-based map system and pathfinding but didn't store nodes on the map as variables - the game calculated the location of the nodes each time they were to be used. That's hideous. I'd also point out that the vastness of the internet's resources should not be underestimated. I could create something awesome in 10 hours using Codecademy as a reference and generic tutorials I found using Google. The problem for me would be finding 10 hours to do this in. I do not think that this is a deliberate attempt to deceive as much as it is a sense the person feels that the person is 'not a proper programmer'. Hell, if I created a similar project now, after completing coursera/proglang and coursera/algorithm-design-and-analysis and working with web design for about a year and a half, I would still call it "teaching myself to code", because there is so much to learn I'm barely dipping my toe in the water.