[pessimizer]

I'm pretty sure I was taught to code in a day.

  10 PRINT "HELLO"
  20 GOTO 10

My first hack was:

  10 PRINT "IM A COMPUTER"
  20 GOTO 10

Now the system was leaking internal information.

The next 30 years have just been variations on a theme. Spawned Erlang processes, in my head, are 20 GOTO 10.

edit: The thing that freaks me out about computer illiterate people being in charge of teaching people computing is that they aren't equipped to choose the experts to hire. She can only evaluate them by their connections, their pleasantness, their respect from peers (who also can't be evaluated), and their massive marketing budgets.

[WilliamMayor]

I remember hacking

    print "Hello world!"

into

    print "Hello World!"

and crossing my fingers, pressing the button, and being amazed that it worked! I was convinced that somehow it would be more complicated than that.

[Beliavsky]

I wish Guido van Rossum had left well enough alone, so that the above line was valid code in current Python (it works for Python 2, not Python 3).

[tim333]

When I was about 15 our teacher was supposed to give a 30 min class on programming but knew nothing about it so I stood up and taught a bit along the lines of

  10 INPUT "Name",N$
  20 FOR X=1 to 10
  30 PRINT N$;" is an idiot"
  40 NEXT

which was quite a hit with my fellow teens. Sophisticated stuff eh?

[pessimizer]

Sounds like the beginning of a wonderful career as a web UX designer:)

Or v0.0.0.1 of http://foaas.com/ ...