You can become functionally capable in any mainstream programming language with some working examples, newbie hello world tutorials, maybe a debugger, and/or stack overflow. You are unlikely to get past an intermediate level of skill, and you won’t understand the deeper patterns that motivated the language designers, but you can add features and write useful applications.

Is that really a monkey with a typewriter?

Absolutely. I deal with people like that on a day to day basis.

I’m betting that all of us operate that way a percentage of the time. I’m not a zsh expert but I have to edit my zshrc file.

If that’s being a monkey, I guess I’m a monkey. But I bet you are one as well sometimes. I have empathy for people doing their best outside their area of experience, because all of us are that person.

If what you are talking about is people employed as professional C++ developers who have a very superficial understanding of the type system, that’s different. But I still don’t think the term “monkey” applies.