- when I read Clark Weissman's `LISP 1.5 Primer' in 1968

- when I finished a student programming assignment a year later and realised that a well-chosen set of procedures constituted what we'd now call a DSL

- when I ported Martin Richards' very clean BCPL compiler and realized that you could write efficient code in something that wasn't Fortran

- when I read the Thompson/Ritchie paper on Unix

- when I completed my first reading of SICP