I believe it! My mom would always tell me about how she would do the same, as a teenager learning to program on her Commodore 64. Funnily enough though, memory

I believe it! My mom would always tell me about how she would do the same, as a teenager learning to program on her Commodore 64. Funnily enough though, memory constraints were still relevant for me and some of my friends - since Ti-83 calculators were the first exposure to programming for many of us. It helped that we were all required to buy them, so we could collaborate and copy over programs to each other. I would write programs so I wouldn't have to memorize chemistry stuff in HS. The teachers back then never checked, and they expected us to use calculators for normal calculations anyhow. By the time I was using real code in college though - I agree. Performance optimization like that was taught as more of a "nice to have", and the only classes where it really mattered were assembly, and one elective I took on game engine development.