it was really only by an improbable string of coincidences that I ended up in software engineering at all.
So natural talent had nothing to do with it? Are you going to tell us that the reason you finished each day's assignment in a few minutes was that you were raised in a monastery of kernel hackers who taught you BASIC before you could ride a bicycle?
Point. Though it's really only been recently that this has become evident, since the people I was hanging out with in high school had not only done the same thing with respect to BASIC, but also understood modem init strings and spoke enough assembler to be dangerous and had assorted other skills that had me thinking I was just average. After high school, I didn't touch an interpreter again until grad school, a good ten years later.
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So natural talent had nothing to do with it? Are you going to tell us that the reason you finished each day's assignment in a few minutes was that you were raised in a monastery of kernel hackers who taught you BASIC before you could ride a bicycle?
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"What's that, Daddy?" I asked.
"It's a computer," he said.
"How does it work?" I asked.
He handed me the manual and said, "Find out!"
I learned how to ride a bike when I was nine.
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...any number of other eight-year-olds, though, had that same opportunity and didn't make it through enough of the manual to do anything interesting.
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