I had a similar experience -- my buddy and I moved on from hypercard to &quot;real&quot; programming when he picked up a codewarrior compiler at a garage sale.<p>I remember sitting there trying to decide if we should try to figure out this weird C stuff or Pascal first. We ended up going with C. Probably a good choice, in retrospect.<p>It&#x27;s hard to tell how much of it&#x27;s &quot;first love&quot; nostalgia, but I remember codewarrior as being very simple, very fast, and very well designed.<p>Visual Studio and autotools were both quite a shock. (I still can&#x27;t believe people use the autotools shit-chain. Ungodly terrible.)