[elcaro]

  > Personally I think this kind of computer-control is the perfect environment for teaching computing. Rather than writing apps or webapps, I feel like the idea of just writing code to do what you the user would do anyways, but better, is a fantastic introduction to computing & programming.

AHK is how I got into programming. I started with a few hotstrings, slowly added more functionality, a GUI, etc. While writing a specific tool, I learned about ReGex, and would often refer to the RegEx table in the AHK docs.

Eventually, I attempted to write a tools to audit network device config with AHK, and a colleague said "why don't you write it in Perl". In looking up Perl, I learned about Python and kinda them at the same time (though interestingly, I still prefer Perl to this day). I also never realised RegEx was a thing people struggled with because I learned it almost immediately after getting into "programming", so I was just part of the learning process.

All in all, I credit AHK with getting me into coding.