Oh, come ON. You wrote this essay specifically to be encouraging. Somebody responded saying they felt discouraged. You failed, and you're getting feedback. You have something to fix if you want to encourage people. Stop being so defensive.
To tag on some constructive criticism: a "you can do it too" kind of post needs to emphasize the limitations of your abilities, so that readers can identify with the before-success version of you, and then show the steps to what you accomplished as simply as possible, so they can realistically imagine themselves becoming the after-success version.
If you emphasize how people's jaws dropped when you did X or Y, then only other programmers who feel confident they can do the same will be nodding along (i.e., not most of them).
If you emphasize the limits of what you had figured out, show clearly how you learned how to do X or Y (and how it's not nearly as complicated as it seems), and puncture the illusion of genius as much as possible (it's mostly just persistence), you can give "normal" developers the chance to imagine themselves making jaws drop simply by putting in some time to learn something most people don't know.
I agree. Another poster wrote that assembler was actually straightforward--just very tedious. That would have been a great way for Jacques to make his achievements seem more possible.
