[goldfeld]

Then that puts you in a position to achieve fulfillment at an earlier age and with less risk than most twenty-something startuppies dreaming of an exit most won't ever get. Even though you're a dreamer, keeping realistic expectations and finding some project you care about is gonna put you on a fast track.

I learned coding within the last 2 years or so, and before that I had felt quite as you did. I dabbled in Visual Basic at 14, but then I came upon this huge wall of C++. I couldn't grasp OOP and it's weird Cat cat = new Cat() for the life of me, and I though I just wasn't smart enough, so I stopped playing with it until recently. In the last year especially I got comfortable (and grew to love) the command line, git, vim and a bunch of technologies I thought I would never have the patience or diligence to wrap my head around. Really the last year has got me so far. You can do a lot in a year's worth of spare time, if you can find a practical project to motivate you.

[solistice]

I agree with goldfeld on this, there is this barrier with every language that many people get stuck on. In Java it's Cat cat = new Cat(), in C it's *fu, in Perl it's s/win/fail, in Assembly it's Assemlby, in C# it's LINQ, etc. But once you manage to get over the first or second hurdle, your perspective on technology widens and you are ready to take on more hurdles.

[solistice]

Additional examples: Haskell - monads, Lisp (()())()()((())), Whitespace