Eventually some people got me back into Flash development (I had dabbled before and had a couple sort of popular things on Newgrounds, and they were asking me for help). I then made a couple of games that were super popular and realized I probably wasn't in the wrong field after all, and eventually went back to college and finished my degree. It was easier the second time around, and I had much better teachers.
Now I've been in the industry for about 10 years and have worked on all sorts of different types and sizes of programs and learned and used dozens of languages and technologies.
That was back in the 90s when I had that semicolon problem, and I'm pretty sure compilers have improved since then, because I usually see compilers catch missing semi-colons pretty much exactly where the problem happens nowadays. Also there was no Stack Overflow back then, and most forums weren't terribly helpful either, and programming blogs were a lot less common and comprehensive.
I remember specifically that I had difficulty wrapping my head around the concept of linked lists and there seemed to be no where to find that information besides my professor who was a real jerk and said, during his office hours, the specific time he's supposed to be available to help students, that "if i didn't understand it during his lecture he couldn't help me" and two old books in the school library that had a few paragraphs about it each.
