>Your whole program was limited to a few kilobytes. You only had 27 floating point variables, a few lists of floats with a maximum length of 999, no real functions or stack or anything, etc. You’d shave bytes by taking advantage of syntactical quirks that the interpreter happened to accept, like not closing parentheses at the end of a line.

I found that smaller programs just ran faster. So I took one I'd written to convert from ASCII strings to binary strings and back. Yes, there's a built in function to do this, but it's very limited. Mine used string representations and so the only limits were memory...Then I changed all the variables to single letters to save space...and rendering the code completely indecipherable in the process.

Learning the hard way that "human readable code" is very important at a very young age.