[duxup]

I took some programming courses in college. I loved computers and was very interested. However, the classes were a guy reading from a book about C. That was pretty much it. You did what the book said and hoped something stuck in your head.

This was early days of the internet, the book(s) were largely the only resource. The instructors were folks who just understood coding in C naturally and had no idea how to communicate with those who did not. No joy in anything, just raw code.

I dropped out.

Decades later after age 40 I was at a career crossroads and took a web development class. I loved it, I could make things quickly, the instructor actually understood how to teach / introduce concepts. I've been happily coding professionally and personally since then.

How things are presented sometimes makes all the difference.

[manfromchina1]

I remember my first interaction with computers was on one of those ancient ones way back when. Our teacher showed us how to make a circle appear on the screen. I was preoccupied with how the computer was actually able to render that circle, what exactly was happening under the hood and what kind of physics was happening for all this to come together as a circle on the screen and not that particular function of whatever program they were using at the time. That turned me off to wanting to mess around with computers for awhile.