@dabeaz Some shining memories from my life:

* Getting a fancy holographic ruler as a gift at age 5 and holding it tightly in my left hand as I drew freehand squares with my right. Then, a double take.

* Reading a book on OO design at age 18 and writing out the algorithm for the game of life in main() before the double take.

* Staring for a long time at a professor's implementation of list reverse in Lisp, and comparing it with the C version I knew to write.