[catenate]

I was able to teach myself Basic programming on a TI-99/4A, Atari 2600, and Commodore 64 from 4th grade (in the early 1980s) because the languages were simple, the machine was simple, there were magazines (Compute!) to crib code from, all the freeware and shareware programs were in source, and my dad said "There's the manual." when I asked him to teach me. :)

I spent time programming because I didn't have a modem. It turns out this was the best thing for me, since I didn't waste my time on BBSes. A friend of mine who had, dropped out of the CS program at Penn State after a digital logic course I loved.

In high school I took a year and a half of Basic and Pascal, but more importantly spent three periods a day in the computer lab exploring every nook and cranny of programs I had to write, programs I wanted to write, and the shell language of the school district's VAX.

Seemed clear to me that I wanted to do computer science, but I switched to computer engineering after that digital logic course. Took college classes in Pascal, C, C++, assembly for microprocessors, common lisp for ai, vhdl for processor design, operating systems, and wire-wrapping a microcontroller system.

Grad school courses in Smalltalk [edit: and computer architecture and petri nets and, most importantly, self-taught makefiles for a class project build system].

After I got out of school I took company courses in Java and Perl, but more importantly taught myself the Unix environment from books, and had opportunities to use it every day at work.

On my own, I read books and did programming exercises in Haskell, Ruby, and Go.

[edit: I dug seriously into make and bash for ten years, writing the build system for a telecom network.]

I have a real passion for functional parallel programming in the Inferno shell, so I'm working on a blue-sky build-tool project. [edit: https://github.com/catenate/credo]

On my job I'm now picking up Python because I have to maintain a build system code base in it.

Overall, I'd say I've probably taught myself more than been taught, but only because I had about 8 years of formal instruction in a programming span of 30 years. The education was essential though, because there were so many concepts I would not have gotten to on my own.