When I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s, I used to do programming contests in school. I even got the equivalent of a couple of "Letters" for a letter jacket,

When I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s, I used to do programming contests in school. I even got the equivalent of a couple of "Letters" for a letter jacket, but never got the jacket cause it wasn't my thing. In HS, we worked on a bunch of different languages, including Pascal, Fortran77, and C. But we always went back to QuickBasic for the competitions. There was so much less overhead with working with that system that it made it way faster for coding the exercises. Eventually in my second year of college I dropped my CS degree because the prospect of never being able to stop learning new marginalia was less appealing than studying philosophy, which seemed less trivial at the time. However all that programming practice stuck around, and now I've made my living doing the same stuff I was doing in HS: messing around trying to get some dumb game to stop crashing on a computer and cobbling together tiny snippets of code to win cheap prizes. So here's to you QB: the reason why I was able to get a job after eventually deciding not to become a professor of literature.