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Been there. Ah, those infinitely nested INKEY$...

Are you me?

I was lucky enough that my grandparents bought me one of those computers that hooked up to my TV, and it had a BASIC interpreter on it. I still have the manual...

I still have the computer too! (Sinclair ZX Spectrum+)

Was it a Commodore 64? That's what I had.

I attribute my code reading abilities to navigating my own GOTO spaghetti while trying to recreate ZORK.

Same here, BASIC, 5 or 6. Text adventure games, lemonade stand, and so on.

Dijkstra says, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." But he complained about nearly everything.

I never really got very far with BASIC anyway, and started reading about OOP when I was maybe 12? Hopefully I was inoculated in time...

I taught myself C++ from the Borland Turbo C++ compiler manual and library books when I was 12-13ish. And later, Perl, then Python, then ...

Same.. my dad had a big book on BASIC programming and we just got our first computer. I've been hooked ever since.