[qsort]

Step two is extremely underrated. There's always been a family computer in my home, but I couldn't do whatever I wanted on it.

My irremediable descent into nerddom started when I got a cheap netbook. It was an awful machine, but I could freely poke around and learn stuff.

If you're just starting, a potato computer that you fully, exclusively own is much better than a great machine that you share with other people.

But of course it's a big time investment and not everyone is interested. If you just want to learn the basics of programming, a fully managed environment is also fine. So much is being abstracted by the programming language itself that the underlying stack is almost a detail.