I agree. There are plenty of very good programmers who never went through formal training. They had to learn somewhere... first copying code, then modifying it

I agree. There are plenty of very good programmers who never went through formal training. They had to learn somewhere... first copying code, then modifying it to their needs, then finally understanding the concepts enough to write it from scratch. I personally remember the first time I used a recursive function for a fairly complicated use. It broke my brain for a while, but I thought about it for several days, stepping through all of the iterations until I had something that worked very well. If I had been told I was a bad programmer because I was having trouble at the time, I probably would have given up.