[33a]

TI92 graphing calculator and the instruction manual. Hundreds of pages of weird math functions to try out and understand. Triggered some kind of weird pokemon-esque collect em all ocd instinct in me and I ended up learning programming as a side effect.

I think one thing that's missing in a lot of current programming education is too much focus on the grammar and basic constructs and not enough focus on the nouns and verbs. Environments like MATLAB, QBasic and even JS are great because they have lots of little bits of random stuff you can just start poking at and plugging together. I wish there were more beginner references which start with lots of random facts about assorted bits and bobs instead of trying to preach some boring grand unified theory of coding.