I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC with the occasional inline arm2 assembly block on an Acorn Archimedes A310. It had its limitations, but it damn well worked and you

I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC with the occasional inline arm2 assembly block on an Acorn Archimedes A310. It had its limitations, but it damn well worked and you could have total control of the machine if you needed it. (also the Acorn Archimedes manual was about 40% "how to use the gui" and 60% a complete introduction and reference for BBC BASIC, which definitely helped; I had to buy a book to get an explanation of the ASM side of things but, I mean, fair enough) Then again the second time I fell in love with a programming language was perl5 so I am perhaps an outlier here.