[ryaf]

Your assumption that self taught programmers (ie one that did not get a "formal" education) do not understand fundamentals is utter bullshit. You could reverse your statements and they both still work. I've worked with people that have a masters in CS and in general it matters about 1% of the time.

A programmer today has a wealth of information they can pull from that does not require a single ounce of formal education. It takes dedication to the craft not bucket loads of money.

[jiggy2011]

I don't think I made that assumption in that post at all.

My point was more that a formal CS education is likely to give you a different perspective on programming vs being self taught.

I would imagine most self taught programmers focus on results oriented learning, when I first learned to program before doing any formal CS my approach was "I want to do X , what is the minimum set of stuff I need to learn in order to do that good enough", after learning more formal CS and being forced to consider things like abstraction and efficiency for their own sake I would always focus more on them in every program I write.

Not suggesting that you can't be completely self taught and learn everything you could from an academic education (you can) but you are less likely to spend a month learning a bunch of design patterns and algorithms unless they directly apply to something you need to do right now.

You are more likely to just start hacking away at something then think "oh, this code is a mess how can I fix that?" rather than reading the entire gang of 4 book to start off with.

[ilaksh]

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.