My first programming class (or my first class I had to use a compiler) was in C (it was one of those CSCI classes for non-majors) and this guy took us through the whole gamut, even if I barely passed the class, it was a rush. It was probably such a rush because I knew what I wanted to do, but had no idea how to express it, until we finally got to arrays, and I realized that a string is just an array of sorted characters. This insight catalyzed another insight and by the end of the year I was more interested in recursing meaningless input just to see what it looked like when it came out, which never really solved anything in my text-book, but this act taught me more about computer programming than any book could, this act showed me that computer programming is the art of counting and comparing for measuring an unknown order of magnitude. I came out of the course with so much more than what my grade reflected (somewhere between a D and C), but could really care less.
One semester later I ended up in a class called Object Oriented Analysis and Design; [insert brain hemorrhage here] I could not communicate with any of these people (nor my teacher) ever since the problem domain was suddenly so tangible, it seemed so much less enticing. This was when I laid my eccentric theory to rest, went with the flow, and started solving my exercises.
