I started programming properly in 2010 when I was 12 or 13. Before that I did some small things in Inform 7, and now I remember it, Visual Basic, but I don't re

I started programming properly in 2010 when I was 12 or 13. Before that I did some small things in Inform 7, and now I remember it, Visual Basic, but I don't really consider that 'proper programming' as it was mostly cutting and pasting code with little understanding. I started with Inform 7, Python, and a little bit of Processing and Lua. I did three or four ludum dares and at some point I made most of a game in Lua with Love2d (around October 2012ish). Maybe a few years later I started delving into 'hacker culture', and I picked up C with K&R (since it was almost universally recommended and easy to read), I also at some point picked up UNIX Power Tools (recommended in Linux Format) and The Practice of Programming. At some point after that I became really interested in Compilers and Operating Systems. When I went for my first internship three years ago, the interviewer said I knew more about the things we talked about, than most other bona fide engineers they interviewed. The university-hired interns that sat next to me couldn't read the Erlang manual or documentation because it just didn't click with them, which while I can appreciate on some level that people have different sources of information that suit them best, it's still astonishing to me. Consider that programmers started out as secretaries learning how to program the machine from the specification and the schematics given. A lot of the programmers I have met, probably wouldn't be able to cope with such a task, I include myself in that category. I agree with you about the quality of books. A fair chunk of the books on my bookshelf from that era are 80s/90s to early 00s because those books are just an order of magnitude better written, with a high signal to noise ratio. Can you imagine a modern language like Swift or Rust being taught to the same level, in the same space as K&R? I can't!