My friend Eric Engstrom (yes, that guy) got a programming job at Microsoft despite having zero …

While what you say is true, I think it is a failure of generalization. A few special cases show it is possible, but what you don't mention is how extraordinary these cases are and at what time they happened and what background, including ideas, information, location, and motivation the people had. You can very much buy an education in many places. Money from parents pays for the best universities, no, actually schools already, the best teachers, the best atmosphere/setting for learning. While some children work on a farm, rich people's children will already be learning, simply because the parents can afford it. There are many places, where it doesn't work like in your extraordinary examples. Just because something is possible for a few, it doesn't mean, that it is generalizable and that it can be done for everyone.

"One of the important ways we make use of donations is in awarding scholarships to highly skilled students. Each $5 you donate contributes to approximately one hour of work by a talented graduate student" from the dlang website. I think it's good that scholarships are awarded, some money goes to graduate students doing work (even if I think the amount per hour is low), etc. But I can't square your implications that this type of education is equivalent to self-taught when your own foundation seems to put an emphasis on it. Or is it just marketing for an audience that might believe that they're not equivalent? Why is there this focus on people from formal education backgrounds or supporting people through scholarships to get a formal education when describing what a donation would go to? I want to re-iterate. It's not that I believe you can just go sit in a class without focusing and acqui…

This post is a great example of how very smart people can fall victim to their own biases. When you put the "all are welcome" sign on the door of your programming language organization, you're not sampling from "all" but just the people who are already interested in programming, and especially the design and construction of programming languages. These people are inherently motivated to learn and particularly self motivated. You know as well as anyone that languages in particular, far and away from all other projects in the area of computing, scratch the deepest itches that good developers have. Languages are a siren song for devs who have a burning desire to get to the bottom of computing machines. And so of course this breed of dev is going to be great whether they have a PhD or not. They are the github-history all green every day crowd. You're skimming the cream of the crop. But you c…

Pointing to unusual people, then claiming that proves they exemplify what should be usual… That isn’t an argument or solution for anything. That’s state some fact, then state your desired conclusion, without even an attempt at reasoning in between. Show me any community that turns their success demographics around. Someone pointing at a few successful examples, and saying everyone should do that, won’t be how they did it. People have suffered in disadvantaged demographics from the dawn of time. They are real. Nobody wants differences like that to exist, but they are pernicious. Context has a huge impact on people and bad contexts are often very self-reinforcing.