My first introduction to this stuff was also the little man computer. I won't say when as it might make some readers feel old, but very fond memories of playing

My first introduction to this stuff was also the little man computer. I won't say when as it might make some readers feel old, but very fond memories of playing around with it. Similarly fond memories of the teacher letting me just do my own thing at the back of the classroom after noticing I was writing an interpreter rather than hard-coding all the logic in the task. Probably hard to state just how good of an introduction he was to programming, actually. Not a codeforces-style geek but was constantly drilling the value of writing beautiful code that is as simple as possible to a bunch of 14 year olds of which probably only me and a friend were listening. Maybe it's not coincidence that amongst my friends/mutuals from that age there are core maintainers for I think three for pretty big languages