OT, but I'm very grateful to Mindstorms, it took me to the next level when I was a teen, from QBasic to C. Not because of its visual block language, which I hated as I could already code, but because I found out about a thing called NQC (Not Quite C).
NQC was a hobbled dialect of C that you could use instead of the LEGO's visual language to program the RCX (the main computer brick with batteries in it). I'd never tried C before, and it was a revelation.
And it unlocked wondrous hacks, like using the IrDA transceiver on the RCX as a psuedo-lidar so that your robot could stop short of walls, it could even estimate distance. At the time, it was so cool to me. From playing with my stumbling robot trying not to hit obstacles I got interested in Rodney Brooks and subsumption architectures. So it just inflamed my passions in AI and programming at a critical part of my adolescence.
Ironic, though, that a Papert-inspired graphical language was the antagonist in this story. The breakthrough came from wanting to scale the walls of the little garden LEGO had built.