When I started coding at age 12, it was on TI calculators. The code was in Zilog Z80 ASM, and TI's flavor of BASIC (TI-BASIC). I suspect many of the hackers on

When I started coding at age 12, it was on TI calculators. The code was in Zilog Z80 ASM, and TI's flavor of BASIC (TI-BASIC). I suspect many of the hackers on this site of used TI-BASIC, and possibly Z80 ASM. This was all of the experience in coding I had for the next 4 years. I became extremely good at TI-BASIC and ASM. But in High School I started fooling around with Python and the world of Object Oriented programming bewildered me. In TI-BASIC you get 27 float variables, 6 lists of floats, all limited to 999 elements, 10 strings, and 6 matrices of floats. That is all the data one gets. Very quickly one becomes a wizard of string manipulations (because strings were the only datatype without a default memory cap; they could be as long as your RAM could hold) and whatnot. Whenever I moved to Python, I found myself following the same paradigm. I didn't make a single Python class until I was in college. I would use tuples and lists and just organize my data that way. After my collegiate conversion to OOP (and subsequently writing heavily OO Python), I later found out that it is somewhat encouraged to use the built in datatypes over custom classes for performance reasons. I was accidentally acting Roman without realizing it!