Me too. I never had access to a real C compiler until 1998, at age 22. When I was all primed to get into it, it was really hard to find a free language environment to develop native apps on my beloved Amiga. As a consequence I got quite lost for the intervening 15 years or so until I galvanised on this goal of becoming an accomplished programmer around 2016, and got my first opportunity to learn-as-I-work on a bitcoin fork project.

The kids these days have a lot of advantages for gaining entry into the field. When I was a kid, the only route was getting a CS degree, and my school's delightful, socialist administration made sure I was unlikely to cool down after they so totally messed with privileges that were granted prior to the introduction of their social credit scheme.

And buying a compiler back in the 90s to build native apps? In today's prices, it was well over USD$5000 worth of expense, about 4k for the compiler licence and another 1k for the system API manuals.

Kids these days can dive into it and push out web apps and electron native apps in a matter of months if they are motivated. Even with my patchy history I was able to land some serious roles in shitcoins in 2021 due to my extensive Go programming experience from the 3 years prior.