[tgb]

I don't find this too shocking. First, they never said she learned everything that much faster, just that there were some things she did learn much, much faster. Secondly, a big reason to not "understand" something is that you never considered it one way or the other. It's easy to just barely get by without knowing what's happening because it works so you move on to something else and then suddenly one day you see it again and go "wait, why?" and then you figure it out. You learned it quickly the moment you realized it was something you needed to learn, but it might have taken literal years before you considered it was something to learn. This kind of stuff I think happens a lot if you're self-taught because programming often (particularly in older languages and environments) involved some weird forms of setup that the beginner could skip by just copy-and-pasting the correct "template" without considering what it was doing.

For me, understanding what was involved with "installing" a library to use in Visual C++ took years even though it's not that complicated. I just followed magic instructions and if things didn't work, then I would just have to ask someone for help. Eventually I understood the difference between the dll and the header files, static and dynamic linking, etc. Someone could have explained that to me literally years before I learned it myself, but I spent years just assuming it was essentially unknowable.