Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?

Pre-planned courses never appealed to me at all, maybe because of some slight ADD tendencies. They try to titrate knowledge in a steady, regulated, and pedagogic way. That just bores the shit out me. The only thing that even remotely excites me is diving into doing things that are too difficult for me, failing, beating my head against my desk, asking real people for help (not supervisors or TA's), making tiny exhilarating steps of progress.

I'm generally very skeptical about all kinds of teaching, upbringing, and so on. Like when parents and educators try to ensure that their kids turn out good by adhering to various "time-honored" methods and curricula, and fail to realize that they're just locking their kids up for decades, ineffectively preaching at them while they wait for the break so they can talk about whatever they're actually, genuinely, vitally interested in.

Maybe I'm just weird, but to me joining a MOOC seems like tying oneself up in chains to learn how to walk. There does seem to be people who actually find sustainable motivation in that sort of thing, but the statistics seem to say they're not as many as those who only think they will.

By all means dabble around with some courses to get your feet wet, but don't expect to become a good programmer by following other peoples' curricula!

I started programming when I was studying for a PhD (in mathematics) around 2006-07. I was 23 at the time. That was mainly in Matlab and Fortran. My code from those 3-4 years is, frankly, pretty horrifying.

When I got my first job in industry (quant at an investment bank in 2010) I had to learn Java, and a language called Q[0], which is a very fast array-processing language with a functional feel and a built-in query language for the KDB database. I also picked up a little bit of R, mainly because I was building a lot of statistical models and it was far easier than doing it in Java.

That piqued my interest in functional programming, and I subsequently learnt Haskell using the book Learn You A Haskell[1]. I picked up Python around the same time when I was trying to write a web scraper, and finding it painful in any of the languages that I currently knew. For that I used Learn Python The Hard Way[2].

When I started a new job in 2011 I started writing Matlab again, causing me to finally learn it properly. Around that time I decided to try and learn a low-level language, so I picked C, mainly because there was an interesting edX course [3] that I wanted to try (the Harvard course CS50).

I'm at a weird in-between stage now. I can write comfortably in half a dozen languages, but there's a whole swathe of programming that is completely alien to me (web design, networking, and any kind of formal software architecture). I've written a lot of heavily numerical and mathematical code, but never written a CRUD app or a web page. I still don't know Javascript.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(programming_language_from_Kx...

[1] http://learnyouahaskell.com/

[2] http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

[3] https://www.edx.org/

I believe the best way to teach yourself is to solve your own problem or build something you're truly passionate about. You can either do something new or improve something you currently use. This is how I taught myself to code in PHP, although now I can also write applications in Python.

2. See 1, more or less. I'd say I -really- started to learn when I built my own website in high school that started bringing in money and still does today. It was a full web application to start and I just kept rebuilding it from scratch as I learned new stuff (object-oriented programming, design patterns, etc).

3. I wouldn't really call myself a professional. I went into bioengineering and medicine, but I still program every day because it runs our current world and will for the foreseeable future. I market myself as a software engineer, but I only accept jobs I find interesting or that pay 6-7 figure salaries.

1) How did you learn to code? Totally self taught from books and RTFM // Self taught plus MOOCs or comparable resources // Some classes in college but no CS degree, remainder self-taught // Self taught plus a developer bootcamp or some non-degree related formal education // CS degree and personal efforts

Unfortunately I never worked in any company so had to learn all the coding by myself and I strongly feels, if you want to be a good developer, you should work in a company and on real world applications with people who knows more than you which speeds up the learning. Though I am working full time on my own marketing product, if given a change, I would love to work part time in any company for free. There are few things which you can never learn from books and tutorial videos

2) When did you start learning (perhaps informative because of the recent rise of MOOCs)?

I do have a computer science degree from a reputed engineering college but I learnt nothing there, though I do have exposure towards programming for 10 years, I only started building real world apps in last 12 months.

3) At what point (if yet) did you start working as a programmer professionally relative to your initial efforts?

last 12 months, I am learning and writing code in parallel.