The problem is not the learning path doesn't exist, the problem is finding it and knowing if you should follow it. When you get started, you don't know what you don't know.

That's why I say I got lucky... I somehow found this learning path and decided to follow it without really knowing if it would be useful.

Yes, I think that dedicating yourself to any project for a long time will teach you a lot, but you can also end up with a lot of holes in your knowledge depending on the path that you take.

For instance, the most common mistake I see people make regarding learning programming is focusing too much on specific languages and frameworks and never learning anything that could be called fundamentals.

I suppose that's what this is really about. Fundamentals versus specifics.

The trick should be how to set things up so other people get lucky in the same way.

I could give you the same sequence of projects and goals I had as a curriculum, and it wouldn't work for you.

As an individual, if you follow this path, I think the answer is to continually be going back to fundamentals, because they will never stop being an inexhaustible font of inspiration for new ideas.

You bring up good points. In my opinion it's difficult to put together any kind of significant curriculum, and it's inevitable that it's not going to work for everyone and some people are going to struggle with it. However, there's probably some tipping point where the material just doesn't work for anyone.

I don't know how to account for that. I don't know what the curriculum should be, or how to make it more digestible. I just know that, as as person who hires other programmers and got a taste of both a software development program and my own self learning, I don't like what schools are putting out, and MIT's change in course material seems to be a drastic turn in that direction.

I am coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that organizational habits (hiring and promotion practices, VC preferences for engineering team structures, etc, etc) are more significant than what universities teach (or perhaps, ultimately, the former determine the latter) and we need a movement towards professionalization, and probably some kind of guild-like structure to gatekeep (that is, establish a competency floor) if there is to be any improvement over the status quo. Andrei Sorin's recent massive tome, though a bit of a rant, influenced my thinking quite a bit here.

That's an interesting idea, I'll give it a read. The big problem I see right off the bat is lack of available talent and hiring pressure, but I reserve my judgement.

I'm editorializing a bit, his formulation of the idea is a little different from mine, but enough time in the industry makes it hard not to conclude that something is eroding the professionalism of the field, and I think his ideas about what it is are probably, if wrong, at least wrong in a very interesting direction.