I've never shared this before, but my very first experience with "write lines into a text editor and run it" coding was in the Boston Public Schools system, at age 8, when we spent a few days learning Turtle graphics in the computer lab. "Move 10, turn 90 degrees, move 10, turn 90 degrees,"... And you have a square! This would have been, ah, 2002 or 2003.
Python has turtle in its standard library. https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html It makes me very, very happy.
Python 2.7 was also my first "real" programming language, which I learned at 14 while working a summer internship at Akamai Technologies after 9th grade. I managed to secure the position over some more talented friends because as soon as we had an Internet connected computer in the house I accidentally broke Windows, got my upstairs neighbor (who I later learned worked in bioinformatics, which explains a lot) to install Ubuntu 12 before my parents got home, and devoted virtually every waking hour of my life to reading Wikipedia, which meant I ended up reading a lot about computer programming terms. The first nontrivial program I remember writing was a polynomial division calculator in Python so I could check my math homework, which I would discover 10 years later helped me a lot with grokking finite fields. I always love when ideas across time knit together.
Python is still my go-to for roughing in ideas to this day. My subconscious sometimes generates nonsense Python code in my dreams after I've had a particularly productive day at work.
Since then I've added quite a few weapons to my arsenal. As a teenager I really enjoyed learning to program in different paradigms as opposed to just different coding styles, so I picked up some Scheme and Haskell early on and they've paid a lot of intellectual dividends. Learning good old fashioned C from K&R has proven to be surprisingly useful context to this day.
Nowadays I'm much more pragmatic: If I can do it in a shell script, arguably the highest level programming of all, that's where I start.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to brag about how cool and geeky younger me was. His life was by no means perfect, but I think he handled things really well!