You can read all the programming books in the world. Actually writing a hello world program will teach you far more.
If you want to learn to play guitar, you need to start practicing simple chords long before you ever learn theory.
The vast majority of what we learn is in a professional environment. I can't build a hobby app with hundreds of millions of active users. We learn at work, and that means sometimes it sucks. But that's why we have blameless cultures, because we all realize you can't learn unless you first do it in a shitty way.
It's also why AI replacing juniors is terrible. Juniors need to make mistakes and figure things out. That's how they become experienced seniors.
on edit: yes, HN cleverboots et al, I should not have written "language specification", you got me! However I challenge anyone of the especially clever people here to go write a hello world in some programming language that you know nothing about, without first looking up how to do it.
That is to say that while hardly anybody "learns the language" to write hello world, they do learn exactly enough of the language to do just that, and continue from there, until they get to some point at which they may feel to get deeper into the language. Thus the parent comment about people not learning the language was not exactly correct either.
Even as a developer with 30+ years experience, I'll write a dozen simple programs before I ever read a specification...
I'm looking for examples of basic control blocks, not esoteric edge cases for advanced features I don't yet care about.