How did you learn programming? How long did getting good take?
albahk: I was a MAD Magazine fan and in a Super Special issue in the early 90's they included BASIC program source code printed in the magazine. I sat down and typed the whole thing in line by line and printed a full-screen pic of Alfred. E. Neuman. That was why I started going through the BASIC manual at the age of 9 or 10. It took getting a job writing JSP/Servlets to get 'better', but still not 'good' 20 years on.