I find this perspective odd because as a self taught programmer I didn't bother learning or trying to learn any of the formalisms you mention like 'variables, s

I find this perspective odd because as a self taught programmer I didn't bother learning or trying to learn any of the formalisms you mention like 'variables, strings, and symbols'. I learned by having a concrete project goal motivated by personal desire that I wanted to accomplish by any means possible. This usually came down to copy/pasting existing code from the internet and fiddling with the values via trial/error without necessarily understanding the inner workings. I've had the experience of walking through the "Learn X the hard way" programming books, as well as Codecademy, with some non-programmer friends who ostensibly 'want to learn coding' and they invariably make extremely slow progress like you describe, because without their own self-motivated project it's just blind symbol manipulation.