Nearly the same story here. In HS the only computers in sight were TRS80 IIIs, PET4032s, and C64s. By graduation I'd moved to assembler for the sense of the met

Nearly the same story here. In HS the only computers in sight were TRS80 IIIs, PET4032s, and C64s. By graduation I'd moved to assembler for the sense of the metal and the speed. First year at college, took intro to programming in Pascal, and oh what breath of fresh air that was. Sure it was cumbersome, had a lot of ceremony, but it had procedures and functions that you could pass parameters to! And structures! Things that had been a hassle in BASIC suddenly had legible descriptions. But yes, BASIC did one thing very well: it got out of your way and let you cut your teeth on the fundamental concept - that a machine can follow a sequence of simple instructions to produce complex behavior. It provided a sense of that dynamic, that I think would have been a little less obvious with an edit/compile/test environment with as much ceremony as Pascal etc.