Reminds me of making Chess in QBasic in school, without knowing what an array was. Was trying to encode board state in graphics (by putting some special pixels at corner of squares). Then got around talking to someone who had already made a chess game - he casually mentioned arrays. It was a revelation to me!

The cycle of just implementing something quickly and seeing the program work for the first time with wonder was something. In contrast to later on, where I delayed implementation and took hammock-oriented programming to an extreme. Curiously, AI is bringing back the 'just do it and iterate' phase with its pros and cons.