When I was 5, my father taught me to program in BASIC on the family's Apple IIe. This kept me entertained through elementary school and into middle school. I re

When I was 5, my father taught me to program in BASIC on the family's Apple IIe. This kept me entertained through elementary school and into middle school. I remember trying to learn C in junior high, but none of the tutorials I found were all that helpful. None of them ever mentioned what a compiler was or where I could get one, so I was lost as to how to turn source code into an actual runnable program. Junior high math classes led to more problems to play with (and a programmable calculator to use for playing with them). In high school, I took all of the programming classes offered. It wasn't until about then that I decided to go into computer science -- before that, I'd been most interested in biology.