It seems I come from the same cloth as both of you. I'm 20, I've been teaching myself various programming languages since I was 8, and am just now beginning to use my knowledge for a (slight) financial gain.

Anyway, I compeltely agree with you about the benefits of a quality online community such as this. I've only been attempting Perl for about a month, and I was fortunate enough to find this place almost immediately. I can honestly say that this has been the most directly useful website I've ever used. I can gush on and on about PerlMonks, but I guess I should ramble on to my point:

While a solid online community is great, a real community is fantastic.

Even from my BASIC days, I never really found anyone that I could relate to about programming. I tried desperately to get my friends, even family, interested to no avail. In high school, I took a BASIC and C++ class ( for obvious GPA-related reasons *ahem*) and much to my dismay, noone there actually cared about the finer art of coding, they just wanted to make flashing pictures, or loop a curse word a 1000 times. They just weren't hackers, to use the cliche. I suppose I still blame my lack of getting any great projects completed partially on the fact that I never had anyone to motivate me. Writing a few cool hacks feels good, but when nobody understands or cares, you begin to feel a little dismayed. Fortunately, through discovering Perl (and Linux), I've found out that a couple of my friends were also closet geeks. Not to sound immodest, but they're not as knowledgeable about programming as me, but they're really willing to learn, and it's great to teach them what I know, and learn things in return.

So I can wrap this up by saying this: Use PerlMonks, PerlMonks is fantasgreat. But don't give up trying to find living, breathing people around that could be just as hacker-ish as you.

And that's why I'm not an English major...