You are right about bootcamps. I think that the entry point to programming has lowered. Most everyone who goes to a decent CS program understands pointers, re

You are right about bootcamps. I think that the entry point to programming has lowered. Most everyone who goes to a decent CS program understands pointers, recursion and object oriented programming at least to some degree. (I have to admit that I needed to relearn pointers a few times) Folks who didn't start from CS programs came from Physics or Math, and picked up on the theory quickly. It's very hard to learn this stuff after college. Today there are a lot of people "learning to code" from other backgrounds. There are Marketing majors who follow the HTML -> CSS -> JS -> Ruby path that you mention. Good for them to start the path. Picking up recursion is an advanced topic for them - and good for them. It's all relative to the starting point. And I hope many of these folks stick it out to get good, because Stanford and MIT aren't churning out enough people to satisfy the demand.