Wow.
My dad was born at about the same time, but came into programming indirectly: he was an accountant, the company got a computer (Honeywell, maybe?), and he was told to figure out how to use it. So he was purely self-taught.
As a teen (so, in the mid-70s) I remember going in after hours to write programs with him, finding primes, perfect numbers and such. Fun times...
These two prior submissions generated a lot of interest:
2022, 1482 points, 593 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33330864
2018, 814 points, 403 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787275