I agree that few programmers are autodidacts in a really strong sense, like the way some outsider artists have developed completely independent (and usually a bit crazy) art styles out of contact with historical art practice. Anyone who isn't sitting in a cave reinventing computation from scratch will learn things from other people, so it might just be useful to think of different ways of learning rather than a strict "formally trained" versus "autodidact" dichotomy. I have a CS degree, but before that I "self-taught" myself C mainly via FidoNet's C_ECHO... but of course it wasn't a one-person echo with no other humans on it, so "self" is in a certain manner of speaking, in that I had no formal teachers there, but did have interaction with people who I learned from.
It's still a vaguely useful term, but I do think it's important to keep the wide variation along more than one axis in mind. Some people mean something like, "I read the manual and taught myself to code", while other people mean something closer to, "I studied something close to a regular CS curriculum, but outside a traditional university lecture environment".
It's still a vaguely useful term, but I do think it's important to keep the wide variation along more than one axis in mind. Some people mean something like, "I read the manual and taught myself to code", while other people mean something closer to, "I studied something close to a regular CS curriculum, but outside a traditional university lecture environment".