My early days of programming were tinkering in BASIC and asking my parents to buy me "Learn C in 24 days" type books and hoping the compilers on the bundled CD would actually work. I had very few resources and had nobody to ask if I got stuck, except for other kids who didn't know much more than me. Seems a lot better now.
That's exactly the self-learning experience. You had simple foundations that demanded to be explored and conquered. My first programming book was a ~700 page Java tome because that was the hot thing. After I had read it start to finish I realized that I still don't know what programming is. Then I read K&R and the scales fell from my eyes. Programming is so simple and elegant! The OOP approach of Java teaches you to just put the things you think of into classes, which is like being handed a blank piece of paper. C has an internal logic and an emergent structure of possibility because it reveals limitations. This is even more so the case for BASIC. Nowadays getting into programming seems far worse than 2000's Java. Everything is a library, everything is answered on Google, all the languages are feature-rich and opaque, any computer is fast enough for the worst code. Why bother if there is nowhere to go?