I taught myself to code in the early 2000s, coming from a graphic design background, through javascript and actionscript[1]. It took me years of sitting in my bedroom after work, reading dense paper manuals with very few resources for clarification. The mailing lists were often intimidating and took days to get an answer, if it all. You can imagine how stressful that was when working on a deadline and hoping that someone responded to your question about some obscure error message before the project was due. I remember being intensely jealous of my coworkers who were learning to code around 2010 and could be spoon fed the information I fought so hard to unearth!

[1] Say what you will about actionscript, it was an extremely helpful platform for beginners. I probably would have given up without the easy installation and IDE support. Javascript had essentially no debugging tools (firebug didn't exist until 2006; browsers were a nightmare of inconsistency, and debugging meant dumping vars via document.write()) and I didn't have the technical skill to get a java development environment up and running at the time.