[jutter]

Playing in Excel one day, I added a button, then double clicked the button, and the world of Visual Basic appeared. It was like peeking behind the curtain. "Is this how they do it!?"

I wrote some surprisingly complex interfaces for online services in Excel, without having much of a clue what I was doing. I didn't understand variables so memory was handled by reading and writing to the spreadsheet - arbitrary cells would hold values, rows were my arrays. In hindsight this very visual way of representing memory was probably helpful to my learning.