I got my first computer in 1995, but it wasn't until 1998 that a classmate told me about QBasic. I remember my first "program" was a text-based RPG, except I d

I got my first computer in 1995, but it wasn't until 1998 that a classmate told me about QBasic. I remember my first "program" was a text-based RPG, except I didn't know about variables so it was basically just a digital choose-your-own adventure book where I enumerated all possible outcomes. I must have written a few thousand lines before looking at some of the pre-written programs and the help manual and learned how foolish I was. The next few years would be an escalating arms race among friends for who could make the coolest game, culminating with an extremely slow ray traced 3D shooter I became pretty good at programming, but having matriculated into college in the early 2000s when software engineering was somewhat unpopular, I'm a physicist now. When my son gets a bit older QBasic might not be a bad starter language