Programming needs lots of training, for which self motivation, self teaching is important.
But to say that all programmers are self-taught is a little short sighted. Beyond the basic syntax, there are difficult concepts and idioms in many languages or programming paradigms that can be quite hard for a person (who is not familiar with such concepts, idioms, paradigms) to discover by him/herself. These things include pointers in C, reasoning about correctness of programs, recursive techniques (dynamic programming, etc.), and many functional programming concepts. Good teachers can make these things a lot easier to learn.
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Programming needs lots of training, for which self motivation, self teaching is important.
But to say that all programmers are self-taught is a little short sighted. Beyond the basic syntax, there are difficult concepts and idioms in many languages or programming paradigms that can be quite hard for a person (who is not familiar with such concepts, idioms, paradigms) to discover by him/herself. These things include pointers in C, reasoning about correctness of programs, recursive techniques (dynamic programming, etc.), and many functional programming concepts. Good teachers can make these things a lot easier to learn.