To identify with some stages that you yourself went through, or to consider some difficulties that he had that never occurred to you as particularly difficult.
One can even get ideas about how to make teaching programming easier, or how to ease the setup/deployment of some open source project based on the author's experiences.
Heck, one can find a hundred messages and ideas to take out from this post.
You wanted to make the comment and thought other people might want to read it. Do we gain anything from your comment? No. Do we gain anything from the bio? Maybe not. Did that stop any of us from pushing text out onto the internet?
But there are still some similarities -- his reasons for learning vi(m) and (La)TeX were basically the same as mine -- word of mouth from people who knew more.
For the record, I'm also a "younger developer", only about one year older than OP. I was never particularly interested in the Web or PHP or anything of the sort. What inspired me to become a programmer was primarily Nintendo (NES and later SNES) -- I wanted to make games. As a young child, when asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, I'd tell people that I wanted to "make MegaMan".
In my early teens, I became a fan of the Final Fantasy series, and like many others at the time, I enjoyed creating little Japanese-style RPGs. Hearing about some technique called "scripting", I decided to write my own interpreter, and fell in love. Since then, I've been primarily a PL geek with a deep interest in programming languages, compilers, interpreters, and related subjects (such as PL design, PL theory, type theory, etc.).
I've also dabbled in operating systems and other low-level systems programming stuff. For whatever reason, I enjoy very low-level programming (as in assembly language, no higher-level than C or Forth) and very high-level programming (as in Lisp, Prolog, ML, Haskell, etc.) -- anything in the middle (Java, for example) leaves me feeling utterly bored.