I first learned to program in VB6 when I was 14 in a high school class. I remember being so excited by programming that I flipped to the back of the book and tr

I first learned to program in VB6 when I was 14 in a high school class. I remember being so excited by programming that I flipped to the back of the book and trying to implement the advanced programming problems only a few weeks in. An explanation of Conway's Game of Life caught my eye, and I tried to implement it. Unfortunately, I hadn't yet learned about arrays or loops, so my implementation was just thousands of lines of if statements. It took me hours of copying-pasting and modifying just to get a 5x5 board working, and I remember balking when the book suggested trying to make a 50x50 or 100x100 board. It was at that point I realized all the content in the middle of the textbook might be worth looking at after all!