> I still recall my first "short circuit" on seeing a BASIC program that read "I = I + 1" and freaking out with "that's not possible". Ha, for me it was the op

> I still recall my first "short circuit" on seeing a BASIC program that read "I = I + 1" and freaking out with "that's not possible". Ha, for me it was the opposite: growing up in the 90ies before Internet, my dad bought a cheap old DOS computer for the entire family on which I experimented with .bat scripting and then discovered by accident the user manual of BASIC, which was included with DOS at the time. So I was familiar with "=" as an assignment operator for variables way before I really learned about variables in school. Because of this, it took me a while to get my head around solve-for-x equations in school, but I never had any problems with the f(x) = x^2 notation, because, after all, it worked exactly like a BASIC function, and I would freak out teachers and classmate because I immediately wondered whether something like f(x, y, z) exists in math. On the other hand, I tried teaching a classmate Visual Basic in the early 2000s, and he had the exact reaction after seeing "x = x + 1": he declared that "this is impossible and makes no sense".