Will successful Self-Taught Programmers please stand up?

Primarily self taught. Started in sales. Since becoming a programmer I have received training from various companies that I've work for. I am working on my own projects and have been employed as a developer for just over a decade. So far, I've survived a few layoffs and the "all software will be developed off-short" panic. If I had to do it over again though, I'd probably be a CS major just to have had the earlier exposure to my peer group that has since gone on to do some pretty cool stuff. I live in the Bay Area, so I'm spoiled in that I have proximity exposure to some of the most active minds in software is often readily available through meetups and other venues.

I'm primarily self-taught, and at the age of 21 I'm comfortable listing 8+ years of C/C++ development on my resume. I built my first web site when I was 11, and I started learning C when I was 13 so that I could add features to a multiplayer text-based game (MUD).

I spent a few years running a MUD, doing some coding competitions, taking on small freelance projects, and learning about data structures, networking, graphics, and other things. When I was 15 I created a full Win32-based 2D game engine for a school project. It even had a terribly designed scripting language for defining levels and game behavior. After that project I vowed to never touch Win32 development again.

When I was 16 they allowed me to take CS courses at our local university, and I thought I'd found my home. Unfortunately I realized most college students at our university don't really care about programming and are just there for the degree. We had no hacker culture, and I tutored several seniors who couldn't fix their own syntax errors.

I've been happily employed since I was 16. I've done freelance, small projects at our university, computer technician work, and embedded systems software development. When I was 19 I got recruited by Lockheed Martin to write flight control software for the FAA for a summer. It was amazing, but I didn't want to work at a big company in the long run, so I turned down the offer to return.

Last March I dropped my job and began working on my startup full time :) I should also note that I'm in college part-time as a CS/Economics double major.

I have to admit that most epic programmers I know didn't get a formal education in CS. Some have degrees in other fields, and some have no degree at all. I think passion for software and building things takes people further than a degree. However, most of the programmers I've worked with that had CS degrees did quality work and had a good understanding of CS concepts. They just rarely seem to be coding demons.

I would certainly think so (the two languages you've mentioned are both regarded as being quite easy to get started with), but everyone is different and is interested in different things. If the demo app you're writing (and the framework you're using, if any) allows you to try something and see the results quite quickly, that's a good way to avoid getting discouraged.

Although frameworks (Rails, Django etc) are a good way to avoid writing boring or non-unique stuff, they do add to the amount of up-front learning you have to do before you can write _your_ programs (since you have to learn the language _and_ the framework at the same time). Trying out some noddy programs that just use stdin/stdout is a good way to learn the language features first and then the framework can follow afterwards.

Early code in any language is always horrible when you look back at it a few months later, don't beat yourself up :)