Sounds very much like my experience, except that I was using Delphi. Non-existent documentation (complicated by me not speaking English at the time), no friends

Sounds very much like my experience, except that I was using Delphi. Non-existent documentation (complicated by me not speaking English at the time), no friends or relatives using computers for anything other than office documents (and very few having or using them at all), no access to the internet, and a friendly neighborhood software store that sold "pirated" copies of Delphi 7 for something like $2. That was an excellent environment to start precisely for reasons you described: double click on any element created an event handler for its "main event", and you could take it from there. But: Object Pascal/Delphi is a quite powerful language and you can write really complicated stuff with it, compiled into a relatively small statically linked executable that worked just about everywhere without the need to install anything. (300-400 KB binaries seemed large at the time, little I knew what awaited us 20 years down the line.) The need to dig and learn everything yourself definitely had some impact and provided some lower level knowledge of things many newer developers don't seem to know or care about, but I very much prefer what we have today where you're not expected to learn to read what looks like ancient Egyptian from scratch to write a basic calculator. Good riddance to those times.