[seyfulislam]

Afraid not. A programmer re-invents the wheel to fully understand the inner workings. I've never heard of anybody (non-programmer) who spent months/years to program a software from scratch just because he can't afford buying it. This guy wasn't a mechanical engineer or something, too.

[gambiting]

He worked in a weapons factory, so I imagine he wasn't there filling spreadsheets. He was probably operating heavy machinery,so even if he wasn't an engineer by education, he had the knowledge needed to do it.

[Pxtl]

If you weren't a programmer when you started, you are when you finished. Wasn't Torvalds pretty much a hobbyist when he began?

[rada]

Torvalds graduated from college with a Master's in Comp Sci.

[Pxtl]

Yeah, but I think he was still an undergrad student when he started working on Linux, wasn't he?

[astrodust]

Although I'm sure Torvalds was an exception, I've met several people that that level that still can't code to save their life. Being a Comp Sci. major and being a programmer are often orthogonal.

[hobs]

There was recently the case of a kid in the australian outback who wrote his own OS from scratch as he was too remote to get anything, it happens more than you think.

Pretty much the same thing as far as I am concerned.

[swah]

Maybe the poster is talking about the last phrase?