Biography of a G-Man

I learned to program in one night. I was working a math assignment and not doing well. I had to present a math project in a few days and chose to write an RPN calculator in Python, but it was not coming well. Worried that I wouldn't complete the project, I went to bed and hoped some sleep would give me a fresh perspective. And it did, more than I imagined, because I went to bed journeyman programmer and woke up a master.

In the past, computer code was external to me–something I saw on the screen or read in books. I was writing code for the computer, trying to make it work. That morning, though, I could feel the code. I was no longer a man sitting at a terminal, I was a programmer working with a computer in a symbiotic relationship.

Since then my intuitive sense for code has strengthened, but I have not had another sudden jump. And I was fortunate to have made the jump at 17, because many make it later in life or never at all. But I'm concerned that I took 9 years to learn to program. Is it really a task so hard that approximately 10 years are required to even have the ability to master it? I think, maybe it is, which in my opinion is not good for a computer-ubiquitous future.