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We believe that great programmers are more practical than theoretical. Sometimes a little theory
may help but really, it's mostly a practical craft. Experience is worth a hundred times more than
knowledge. And indeed the same is true for many things but in particular it's true for human
languages as well as for programming languages.

As someone who taught myself programming through experimenting, reading reference documentation 
and studying other peoples code my perspective is that academia not only is unnecesary in our craft
but more than that I daily see the damage that it causes.

Academia is not really in a position to teach programming in a practical way because what they teach
needs to have "academic" value. Sorry to all of you who went through years of academic studies to
become a programmer.

When I had learned basic, pascal, assembler and C, and started to look at perl, was when i realised
that the things that different programming languages have in common are far more than what differs
between them. The common things being conditions, loops, arithmetics, assignments and wrapping it
all up in function calls, are universal and if you understand that the stntax becomes just a shell.
Not really like you are listening to an unfamiliar language but more like listening to an
unfamiliar accent of the /same/ language. Sure scottish may sound a bit funny but you probably get most of it!
That's when I stopped counting the number of computer "languages" that I know.
Now you may say that reading code is not the same as writing it but if you can read and understand code
then you can copy it! And then you can adapt it. And you can change it ad many times as you want until
it works and in that process you will pick up how to write it!

Excercises: Start building code with implementation, actual code that does stuff, then work out the structure.

It may be good to have a plan but remember that you are not building a "house" because you can always change the structure
at any point in time (this only becomes difficult if you have too much structure to begin with.
The more you build the more you learn about your codebase and then it becomes easier to know what
"good" structure actually is.