I guess its obvious, but I am (mainly) a self-taught programmer, and I think that you really don't know what you are talking about.
When I was around seven years old, we had a Tandy Color Computer 2. I wore out the book that came with that, playing with BASIC. We also had a Vic 20, a TI-99a and an Ohio Scientific, and eventually an IBM AT compatible. For years, I spent a lot of time playing with short BASIC programs.
Eventually, maybe around seventh grade, I got a book called Turbo Pascal Disk Tutor (or something like that). I loved that book and I spent many months studying the book and doing the exercises. I was very serious about learning object-oriented programming. Over the next couple of years I experimented with a simple wireframe 3D CAD-like program. I became very familiar with abstraction, polymorphism and other object-oriented concepts before I entered the 9th grade.
Anyway, I'm not going to list every single program I ever wrote or design pattern or programming language or concept I taught myself, but the point is, I did read books and learn a lot of things that are actually apparently missing from many undergrad and even graduate CS-like programs. A guy at Stanford just recently came out with a Rails course partly about software engineering, which apparently is practically revolutionary. There is more contemporary software engineering baked into Rails than what probably more than half of CS or even SE graduates in the last five or ten years ever saw in their courses.
And ever since I dropped out of college (only took like two CS-related courses while I was there), I have been extremely motivated to learn as much about CS and software engineering as I can, mainly because of attitudes like yours.
When I was around seven years old, we had a Tandy Color Computer 2. I wore out the book that came with that, playing with BASIC. We also had a Vic 20, a TI-99a and an Ohio Scientific, and eventually an IBM AT compatible. For years, I spent a lot of time playing with short BASIC programs.
Eventually, maybe around seventh grade, I got a book called Turbo Pascal Disk Tutor (or something like that). I loved that book and I spent many months studying the book and doing the exercises. I was very serious about learning object-oriented programming. Over the next couple of years I experimented with a simple wireframe 3D CAD-like program. I became very familiar with abstraction, polymorphism and other object-oriented concepts before I entered the 9th grade.
Anyway, I'm not going to list every single program I ever wrote or design pattern or programming language or concept I taught myself, but the point is, I did read books and learn a lot of things that are actually apparently missing from many undergrad and even graduate CS-like programs. A guy at Stanford just recently came out with a Rails course partly about software engineering, which apparently is practically revolutionary. There is more contemporary software engineering baked into Rails than what probably more than half of CS or even SE graduates in the last five or ten years ever saw in their courses.
And ever since I dropped out of college (only took like two CS-related courses while I was there), I have been extremely motivated to learn as much about CS and software engineering as I can, mainly because of attitudes like yours.