What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?
It's interesting that this question implied the negative -- not <i>what's the difference between</i>, not even <i>what are the strengths and weaknesses of</i>, but:<p>> What pieces of the whole are missing?<p>The implication being that without a formal CS education, it is an impossibility to obtain a whole. As if whole matters; how does one obtain <i>whole</i>, anyway?<p>This is a very loaded question and perspective that betrays a serious bias, in my opinion. That we're making a generalization out of humanity's life experiences is futile in itself, but alas, the application of said generalization here is far more interesting to me.