Richard Stallman was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start. The problem is not Richard Stallman or the Free Software Foundation. The problem is us. The problem is that we didn’t listen.
All right, that’s an argument. Also, having fun from coding is also a valid argument. Though, from my experience, it is easier to start learning programming from some simple, isolated cases, as in thextbooks, than from real life programs, which can be very nasty and domain-dependent.
To start learning yes, but as I’ve gotten more experienced I find myself getting a lot more value out of real life examples. Cracking open a git repo and seeing how they did something can save me hours of reading documentation or at least give me a better context to grasp it. People learn differently from each other, and also themselves at various stages of their understanding.