I started by taking Fortran and Basic back in the 80's when I was getting my Bachelors in Business.  In the mid 90's I decided to go into IT so I went to a technical school and took Assembler, C, C++, Visual Basic, PASCAL, and DBASE.  I started writing programs in Informix and did that for 14 years along with a little VB, some PERL, and some printer language I cant remember.  Now I'm a DBA and work in SQL and VB mostly.

I wholeheartedly agree though.  It's hard to fully understand being a DBA unless you have some experience in programming. 
JB