[HCIdivision17]

I can echo quite a lot of your sentiment. In high school we learned C/C++ (on TurboC++!) and had a blast. We were quite happy to get anything done, and never aspired to much since it took so much effort to do even simple things. Ideas and algorithms had a lot of hoops to jump through to get the computer to understand them.

Fast forward a number of years, and I'm an engineer working in a plant. I need to get some analysis done, and Excel just ain't cutting it. Somehow I happen upon pandas and IPython, and it's magic. I remember building classes for calculating vectors and such in high school, full of pointer nonsense and terrifying piles of boilerplate. (You haven't lived until you're a newbie attempting to code a templated class that makes doing physics look like an ordinary equation - you'd think it's easy, and it is! Right until it ain't.)

And now? I open up localhost:8888 and spin up a new Python kernel. Within seconds I am importing opencv and doing stuff I couldn't dream of in high school. And it's fast! I lost years from the discouragement of fighting linkers and arcane syntax errors. Intellectually gratifying sometimes, but ultimately not worth starting in. Accomplishing real work early counts for a lot.

Never mind that the curriculum attempted to switch to Java in our third year in high school. We all rebelled and won, and I feel like we dodged a bullet there.