I never considered that perspective, that the difficulty (and dare I say, ugliness) of the language might've discouraged me early on. A prior job in Cambridge, MA paid for me to take any course I wanted at Harvard Extension School (a branch of the esteemed Harvard school) and I picked an intro C programming class. I learned a lot, but mostly I learned how challenging it was and how annoying programming in C could get (i.e., how easily I could become discouraged).

I've always assumed that my difficulty becoming proficient with C/C++ was due to the fact that my brain started learning on BASIC, which wasn't nearly as "close to the machine" as C is. What I loved about that C programming class was how much I was learning about how the physical hardware worked (e.g., pointers; most people in the class seemed to hate pointers but I loved them).