> That attitude is actually how I program—with scripted languages I write code and see what happens, if it didn’t work I write it again.

This is an incredibly harmful attitude towards learning, but it feels nice because it's a lot less effort than actually trying to read or listen to something to learn. It's just laziness.

Learning C++ this way is how someone would end up with a buffer overflow every 30 lines of code they write. It's the reason some self-taught developers can't give you the fuzziest definition of the difference between O(n) and O(n^2).

The closest approximation of this is how kids learn to speak, but this is incredibly inefficient, and they receive many years of formal education anyway.