In the late 70's while in my teens, I was interested in making video games. I had a TRS-80 and learned BASIC and then Z-80 assembly-language. I then bought a

In the late 70's while in my teens, I was interested in making video games. I had a TRS-80 and learned BASIC and then Z-80 assembly-language. I then bought a Commodore 64 and learned more languages while at a tech school. I became a programmer for banking software and never really got a game off the ground. To answer your second question, I wish that I had some insight into software design as I was learning to program. Too often, I would kludge through something in BASIC ... that was the mental model of the software that I retained. It was hard to translate something like that into assembly-language or anything other than BASIC. I took a course in Pascal which helped to organize my approach to problem decomposition and program design.