There's something to this. As a kid, I tried to learn C, but the idea of pointers didn't really click. I gave up and later learned x86 assembly and then what

There's something to this. As a kid, I tried to learn C, but the idea of pointers didn't really click. I gave up and later learned x86 assembly and then what a pointer was became completely obvious. A couple of years later in our high school's electronics lab, they had this radio shack "microcomputer trainer", which was a breadboard kind of thing with a seven segment display, some LEDs, a speaker, and a hex keypad. The great thing was how simple and straightforward everything was. There were about 30 instructions, and you programmed it by entering the machine code directly via the hex keypad. You did the assembly yourself on a piece of paper. I don't envy kids learning programming today, because there is so much complexity in the stack below where you're operating. You have to just take on faith that things work a certain way, and it can be hard to reason about if you don't understand how it works under the hood.