Never really had anyone to guide me through programming. Parents bought a computer when I was about 8/9/10. Most classes I took were on word or excel. Had a

Never really had anyone to guide me through programming. Parents bought a computer when I was about 8/9/10. Most classes I took were on word or excel. Had a bit of side influence from local pc users group and BBS environments. Doom, and subsequently, the doom hackers guide, were probably one of those chief influences that subsequently saw me start to take things apart and realize how they all worked and fit together. Had friends that I got together with over IRC and gamed with. More games followed. Started IT in university, but dropped out after the first year because using eiffel was the most boring experience I'd ever had, and not what I enjoyed about using computers. Continued tinkering in various tasks/languages as needed over the years, but never really got past the basic ability to use loops/arrays/conditionals, etc. Things really got serious when I decided to use employment to learn. Figured I might as well get something out of a paid job, and decided I'd challenge myself to program everything I had to do at work, not use any of the pre-prepared solutions. I learnt SQL in which i tried to do everything. Then i moved on to imperative C-style languages, and tried to do everything in that. Then learnt regular expressions. Then used C. All along this time I kept bumping into python because I began to experiment with ubuntu. Lastly, after doing all that, I decided I wanted a language that was compiled, had good performance, was functional, had macros, and was free. I discovered and taught myself lisp. From the SQL period on, i can't say i ever had anyone else to guide me. I just kept picking up new stuff, and challenging myself to do everything from the ground up. Every time I found something I couldn't do, or something I didn't understand, I kept at it until i did. Somehow, at the end of it all, I'm a guy with qualifications in other fields that really became a programmer anyway...and now knows more than most of the IT guys :(