[javert]

Don't wait until next year. Start programming now. School is good to learn computer science; school is not needed to learn how to program.

Don't read anything into the 5 lines of code per day. This is a pretty old article and even then, that would only be a reasonable figure if you take a large number of people on a large project and compute an average for everyone. In other words, counting refactoring, fixing bugs, re-writing things, doing administrative work, and so on towards the time elapsed. And even then it would vary so much from one project to the next that you couldn't get a reasonable representative number, though 5 LOC per day would certainly be possible.

[jebediah]

I have already started programming, it is just that all the problem sets I have solved were easy enough that I could get to coding right away, and when I couldn't I just thought I was dumb

[javert]

Don't ever let yourself think you are dumb. It's a lot more harmful to your psychology and to learning than it may at frist appear.

If you can't figure something out, you are just lacking some knowledge you need. I wish I had learned that a long time ago.

Being dumb is never the explanation for not understanding or figuring out something.