[Koshkin]

My first programming language was assembler. From the outset that completely removed the shroud of mystery concerning “what happens under the hood.” To this day I am convinced that it was an important step in and of itself, and I also believe that knowing how data structures are represented in computer memory helped me a lot. The rest (C, then C++) were a breeze. I know, “computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes,” but there’s a good reason for Knuth’s choice of the language for the analysis of algorithms, and I have a suspicion that had I started with something like SICP I’d be scarred for life instead of enjoying what I do.