I learned my first programming language pretty quickly, right through the complete textbook including the "Advanced" parts in about 2 1/2 hours; a lot of it, I was learning the programming language and understanding how to use it as quickly as I was reading the pages. Not many people learn that quickly; it just happened to "fit" for me.
That was about March of Grade 9 for me. Was I "professional" level by the time I got to university? I wouldn't say so. Sure, I was a hot-shot programmer, but "professional", No.
University taught me a lot about common algorithms, and about ways of thinking about programming, programming theory, and introduced new kinds of tasks to program about. Meanwhile, on my workterms during university, I learned about Transaction Processing; and Pay and Benefits Systems; and formal Structured Programming (including formal tools for structuring projects); and about how to analyze Request For Proposals, and estimate effort, and what kind of pitfalls to look out for, and how to prepare proposals; and about how telephone systems worked; and about real-time programming; and about systems administration; and about systems integration; and about Death Marches.
A programming professional should be able to sit down with someone who wants some work done, and work with them to create a list of requirements, and to write those up, and to analyze how to segment the work into phases, and estimate the work, and write up everything, and to document, document, document. And, of course, to actually implement, preferably on-time and in-budget. (I say "preferably" because it is pretty much inevitable that the other side will want changes. And some parts just turn out to be hard -- in research programming, approaches that sound good in principle can turn out to be Not Good Enough.)
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