An anecdote about motivation: when I was in grade school, I made custom maps and scenarios for Starcraft (the original), with if-then-else conditionals, and the

An anecdote about motivation: when I was in grade school, I made custom maps and scenarios for Starcraft (the original), with if-then-else conditionals, and the like. The official editor had a wizard where you would enter these, but it was extremely tedious to use, requiring lots of mouse clicks. Alternate editors were starting to come out that would let you enter these events as a script, so I turned to scripting instead. After a while, hand-writing the script was becoming a chore, so I wrote a code generator. I realized that the browser had a script interpreter and I could just use checkboxes and form inputs and lots of Javascript to manipulate a bunch of 'document.write()' statements to produce copy-pastable code. I had no interest in programming, and yet I using programming as a tool without realizing it.