A few weeks ago I saw a video from the guy who wrote Windows Task Manager, he has a youtube now, and he went through the steps in Assembly to create a minimum runnable Windows program.
And it finally clicked for me. It's all just. C++ and Windows and stuff, it's all just. Talking to the OS, with a bunch of basic commands. You're just... asking the computer to do stuff, and it does it, and returns the results. It's all basic commands, if you can get over that there's a kajillion of them and nobody can tell you plainly what they all do.
Like, I get that the entire point of code, is "telling the computer to do stuff and it gives a result", but like.... it took until seeing that video, in an example so simplified in its action of "telling the computer", for it to actually... Click.
My brain couldn't handle the jargon & abstraction. Nothing had laid it out in such plain terms before, that all the weird inscrutable lines of C++ that Visual Studio kicked me to when I wanted help... was just. A Request To The OS To Make A Window Or Draw Text. I probably sound insane or stupid rambling about this, but I've just been thinking about it a lot.