Well I don't have a license nor did I follow any education to be a programmer.
I only started working as a programmer in february of this year. I joined perl monks a bit after that. Wel I know most of the theoretical stuff that need to be known. The more I program the better I get and maybe when I have 20 years off experience I can be a 'guru'(this is a very big maybe).

I went from programming websites(HTML, Javascript) to programming apps for the web in PHP and now I use perl on a regular basis. I build apps to interact with oracle or mysql. On the side a administrate several linux webservers.

So you see I came al long way in the time-frame of 1 year.

Now to widen the perspective: it's not because you get educated at school for programming makes you have the right spirit for it. You need to read a lot: books on the web. Also interact with fellow collegues. And realise your code is not always the best solution. And above all try and program and have *FUN*. Yes I have fun programming, you guys make it all sound so serious. I'm also serious doing my job good and program well, but I need to have fun doing it.

Don't you ?

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My opinions may have changed,
but not the fact that I am right