My first programming experience was with this shareware Mac app called GameMaker in the mid-90s. It let you make card-based adventure games. I ended up meeting

My first programming experience was with this shareware Mac app called GameMaker in the mid-90s. It let you make card-based adventure games. I ended up meeting all these kids on AOL back then who also used the app. I'm still in touch with a lot of them, and it's amazing how many have become incredibly talented, successful, entrepreneurial folks (and we're all mostly in our 20's now). The interesting thing is that this app was probably the worst way to learn programming. It didn't have operator precedence, functions, arrays, or many other basic features. It was a toy language in the most pejorative sense of the term -- not one carefully laid out for pedagogical purposes. I learned so many bad habits. But that didn't matter -- the real important bit is that we all learned how fun it is to actually build stuff on your own and release it. I think that's the critical spark that makes the rest happen. So many people have never experienced this joy and spend their entire careers only working on things other people have assigned to them.