[finack]

Learn some C, and dabble in assembly, because that's what the computer is actually doing under the hood. Every operating system you probably use is written mostly in C. It exposes you to the gory details of computation: memory management, function calls, fiddling with the stack, etc. The fundamentals are simply what the computer is doing that usually gets abstracted away from you. Learn how your computer actually works, not the Pollyanna version presented by high-level languages. Sure, use Python for playing with trees and graphs, but spend time down in the dirt with the language that still underpins a large amount of software.