As a kid I had to learn at least a little Basic (mainly GWbasic), so I could load and play games. But things really took off when a cousin borrowed me his "Qbas

As a kid I had to learn at least a little Basic (mainly GWbasic), so I could load and play games. But things really took off when a cousin borrowed me his "Qbasic for beginners" book. Code printed out in a popular hobby science magazine helped a lot too. I remember manually typing over whole pages full of unintelligible poke commands and how those would work at best 30% of the time. I think it was the ability to directly tinker with the values and formulas in the games that I loved to play that shaped the coding style I'm still using to this day. Often I'm not exactly sure why I'm trying something, other than that it just "feels like it might be the right thing to do". And about 60% of the time it turns out I'm right.