I respect your opinion, however I'm quite sure that person who asked this question actually cares about what he does because I don't think he would have posted this otherwise. I mean I could be wrong but this is what I felt when I read it.

Either he just doesn't have the natural aptitude, or he doesn't love it enough to learn.

I can't fathom how anyone could be a programmer/trying to become a programmer and not have constant side projects, partially written OSes, games, etc

It's easy to say "I want to be an X", but then you realize that you're not spending enough time doing X to become good at it. And the reason you're not spending enough time doing it is because you just don't love it enough, perhaps you love something else more.

He writes "I'm trying to improve my knowledge by studying algorithms, but it is a long and painful process."

Which is depressing. You do not learn how to program by 'studying algorithms'.

Do you learn to become a great author by reading the dictionary? No.

It doesn't sound like he wants to be a programmer for the right reasons to me.

I disagree.

The (quite old; it'd be interesting to see how this panned out) question came across to me as someone who, at the end of their many years in education up to this point, has got very used to directed learning. They are used to learning by being set a challenge with some accompanying theory and completing the challenge. They may well be good at this and enjoy doing it, but they haven't become used to searching out the material for themselves.

In fairness, for a corporate setting this may not be a great limitation! When you're working on someone else's project doing maintenance work as most developers end up doing, the need to seek out new problems and work out novel methods can come later; for now, your work domain is fairly closely controlled.

We may well have a CS graduate without the passion to stick at development, but this isn't necessarily the case. I did very little personal work then, because I had other interests as well and was doing plenty of programming for my course, thank you. I think we've got someone with the self-awareness to realise their limitations but insufficient experience of learning outside of education to know how to address this.

It came across to me as someone who wants to learn programming for the wrong reasons. For example they heard it pays well. Rather than wanting to learn it because they love it.