When I was in high school I had access to three programming tools: Commodore BASIC, 6502 assembly, and Turbo Pascal. I spent years hand coding 6502 assembly because BASIC was clearly for amateurs and I could only get at the Pascal system at school.

At one point I wrote my own Pascal interpreter for the C64. In BASIC, because I wasn't good enough to do it in assembly. It was a little slow.

I desperately wish someone had introduced me to lisp. The entire course of my life would have been different. The most frustrating thing is that I probably could have written a naive lisp interpreter in assembly.