As a completely irrelevant aside, I quickly moved onto Z80 assembly when I was a kid because TI-BASIC was so slow and limited. It was amazing getting sprites drawn at real-time rates.
Same, though I was too dumb[0] to grok what I was doing in high school. It took me until my third CS course in college to finally understand what I was doing at that level of programming.
[0] Not really dumb. I was accomplishing my goals, but I had no understanding. It was a combination of rote copying and imitation, and dumb luck.
