Hey there, I am a self-taught programmer and I want to ask you how many of you learned programming by learning it on your own and how much went to a university and got their CS degree. I'm asking you this as I was talking with other fellow programmers about the fact that people prefer the university path because being self-taught is a lonely pursuit. Do you agree? Thanks, Alin R.
You learn programming by programming, and this is not something you learn ex cathedra: you have to do it yourself.
On the other hand, it's nice to go to the university to have some human contact with teachers and students. There are also a few things, some know-how knowledge that's best learned amongst peers, than by experimenting alone or from the books.
Then there's yet another option nowadays: MOOCs. There you have almost all the positive sides: - you learn alone, - you have a teacher giving ex cathedra lectures, - you have also some contact with other students thru forums.
And for some of the know-how transmission, some programmers post videos on youtube of their development process; it's not entirely perfect, but it's a step.
One thing for which it can help to learn in the same room as a teacher and students, is to debug your learning process, or to detect the errors in know-how you may have learned: somebody may notice you're doing something wrong and tell you. With self-learning, or with remote learning (MOOC), it's easy to check whether the result you obtain is right or wrong, but if you obtain the result doing the wrong thing, it's harder to detect and to correct. Then it's up to you to experiment a lot and to hope to find a good local extremum of know-how.
If I had to pay I'd probably not have applied. IMHO you can learn pretty much everything by reading Wikipedia and other free sites, as long as you're able to stay focused. On the other hand, you'll get to know like-minded people in university, and many people find their first job through their fellow students. So there's definitely a social aspect to it as you say.