HyperCard and Excel were my programming gateway drugs.
HyperCard was a mix of like PowerPoint and HTML / JavaScript. Just was so much fun for a kid to play around with. And everything you built had a visual element you could show your friends.
I used HyperCard to re-create a MUD I really liked with a visual interface. Sort of like Myst... I had a blast. Certainly wasn't the first person to do that, but all the little coding tricks I had to learn to pull off my vision all came in handy later.
> HyperCard and Excel were my programming gateway drugs.
Same! I had played with C++ a bit, but what really made programming logic stick for me was when I made my teacher a gradebook in Excel in 9th grade. His logic for calculating the grades in class was a bit strange, and he was doing it all manually, and my grades were exceptionally bad in that class, so I asked if I could get some extra credit if I could make his grading easier. Surprisingly he said yes [1], so that weekend I really crunched through Excel and pumped out a gradebook that implemented all the rules he was using to grade.
It was the first time that "if" and "else" statements really clicked for me, and it got me interested in "real" languages.
[1] In hindsight he really shouldn't have. It was sort of an unfair bit of favoritism he was paying to me, but 15 year old me didn't really care.
HyperCard was a mix of like PowerPoint and HTML / JavaScript. Just was so much fun for a kid to play around with. And everything you built had a visual element you could show your friends.
I used HyperCard to re-create a MUD I really liked with a visual interface. Sort of like Myst... I had a blast. Certainly wasn't the first person to do that, but all the little coding tricks I had to learn to pull off my vision all came in handy later.