Ray tracing was my introduction to CS-like "real" programming, i.e. not just typing stuff in[1], but actually sitting down and thinking about the math of the pr

Ray tracing was my introduction to CS-like "real" programming, i.e. not just typing stuff in[1], but actually sitting down and thinking about the math of the problem[2]. I remember being super-excited (at 14-or-so yrs old) at being able to have my Turbo Pascal program draw a 640x480 grayscale(!) plane+sphere image on my monochrome VGA screen... which was the style at the time; the VGA card having been bought by me via pocket money and the screen having been bought by my parents. (Which is just another way of saying they bought both.) Ray Tracing offers a remarkably big payoff for very little code. It does require a little algebra for line+(plane/sphere) intersections and such, but that's stuff you can easily look up these days. [1] Yeah, I'm old. We had "codes" (typically heavily compressed/obfuscated) in these things called computer "magazines" that you would type in and see what happened. [2] There's always math. Even if you're doing CRUD, there's probably math behind it: Form validation is a certain type of math, etc.