I totally agree with what you said. I'm really quite sad how late I got into programming (at 14) by basically some random occurrence. Yeah, at the moment I'm ahead of my peers by significant amounts, but I know I could have done\would be doing a lot more, a lot more efficiently if I had had any formal education from the start on related topics, lessons that start with the sentence "Today we're learning how to use Microsoft Word" don't really count.
