> We tried BASIC, and could write some simple loops, use conditionals, and print to the screen, but never figured out how to do anything fun or useful.

Luckily my BASIC books had most of their examples starting with SCREEN 1. Drawing images programmatically happened to be fun and useful, I learned the hard way by retyping examples and then somehow began modifying those.

My own bummer was Windows epoch. I could do VB but never otherwise grasp Windows programming because any program will have so many IDE-generated boilerplate that was totally meaningless to me and I could not work with that.

I could only resume when I learned proper WinAPI later as an University course, but then again I switched to Linux, which is a best IDE there is.

UPD: meaningLESS