This sounds like my story exactly. I would have hacked on personal projects using Lisp or Smalltalk. My curricula was based on C++, and I could never quite grok

This sounds like my story exactly. I would have hacked on personal projects using Lisp or Smalltalk. My curricula was based on C++, and I could never quite grok it. Ironically, I didn't "get it" till my senior year when I took a graphics class that was taught entirely in C. I think CS programs do a disservice teaching with an OO language too early. The first language should be functional.