> Statistically, if you know programming, you probably learned it in a tertiary education setting, most likely in your late teens or early twenties. Just like learning a foreign language at that age, you'll never be perfectly fluent. You'll always have an accent, no matter what you do.
I appreciate your story, but this comment bothered me, because it's something people repeat a lot and it's actually not true. There's no good evidence that adults have more difficulty acquiring language than children. There were some older studies that claimed to show such, but as has become all too familiar these days, their methods were spurious and there have been some replication issues.
I work for a company whose entire purpose for the last 35 years has been making fluent speakers of adults. We do it. We do it regularly. Our students are diplomats and military personnel. They don't really get a choice of whether they study a particular language. It's their job and they have to do it.
The reason adults fail to gain fluency in foreign language is because they don't do the work. They choose to do other things. There is no fundamental limit on the language acquisition abilities of adults, if they just stop bitching about homework and put the effort in.
And I firmly believe the same is true about programming. I didn't start programming until I was 16. I didn't even have a computer until I was 15. I'm almost 40 years old now and I'm the head software engineer for my company. The people I see who struggle with programming who have been at it for years, they're the ones who have approached their entire career under the attitude of "I am not very good at this, I need to find easy, quick fixes for things". Rather than putting the effort in to learn, they cheap out and never grow.
It may feel like growth is not a linear function of effort all the time. Sometimes you feel like you're banging your head against a wall, not understanding things, and not progressing. That's mostly just feeling. I've had it several times myself and have been surprised to find, coming back to a topic several months later, that the topic much easier to understand on the 2nd go. Even when we subjectively feel like we aren't learning and aren't progressing, we still actually are.