Must be both, got a programming degree ages ago in stuff like Cobol, Assembly and Fortran. Went to work and learned Basic, Pascal, and Algol among others. But I got dumped into maintaining some Perl programs, awhile back, with no time at work to learn, so I wrangled a course at the local Junior College to give me the basics, well I was sitting in class trying to figure out what I was supposed to maintain. Seems to have worked, and since then I've been taking the C++ series at the JC to get familar with that, and hanging out here to see what else I can pick up. But based on my recent class experiences, my degree, I feel, certainly has made picking up new programming languages a lot easier than having no programming background, or so interacting with my fellow newbie programming classmates would lead me to believe.