This. It might seem odd to some to combine BASIC and assembler but a programmer friend of mine used that ability to start playing with assembler (which he'd never done before) and experimented with replacing some BASIC routines in his games with assembler. As a relative newbie his socks were blown off at the speed-up he could achieve, I feel sure that it spurred him on in his programming career. (Ironically he is now a contract programmer writing corporate software in Java, but there you go...!)