Yes, anyone can teach themselves a language like HTML or CSS, Java, Visual Basic. I'm in the process of teaching myself C# right now and taught myself Basic when I was younger. Heck, I even taught myself to play guitar.
The difference is that in martial arts, like Andrew said, there's not the same feedback that you get with these types of knowledge....
Let's say I want to write a little program...what the heck, let's use the gold standard. I want to write a program that will display the message, "Hello World.". I can learn a language or use one I already know.....or....I could sit down, design the language, come up the syntactical and semantic structures and guidelines for the language, is it going to be Object Oriented or Structured, how will it handle input and output, what keywords will it use, will it be strongly typed or let you blow your foot off, how am I going to translate it into machine language - use a compiler, what about intermediate code generation or should I make it a translated language, am I going to provide any libraries to the user or are they going to be on there own when it comes to things like data structures and such.., once I'd got that down, sit down and write a compiler or translator...I've done that, albeit small scale, and I'll be damned if I'll do it again unless someone pays me big money, after I've got the bugs in the compiler worked out I could sit back and admire my handiwork, done all by myself....without outside help...oh crap, but I still have to write that program....but I can't remember quite how to do it...oh yeah, I better document my language so people know how to use it...an ubeliavably huge project in itself. Ok that's done, now to that program....and finished....look what I did all by myself....
And wait for somebody to walk by and say, "Hey, that's pretty neat....but all's you had to do was this..."
#include<iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
cout << "Hello World";
return 0;
}
