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.
It just opened my mind, to the idea that it's Really Not That Complex If You Think About It. The big draw of RISC Assembly to me, is yeah it's complex in that you have to do a lot of things to get anywhere. And logic can be confusing. But... no single thing you're doing, is more complex than simple addition.
I'm fully self-taught. Which for programming, is really just a Hellish experience of inscrutable jargon, unnecessary abstractions, and text that makes you realize why silicon valley compsci nutheads think AI is any good. It's a fucking mess out there. It genuinely infuriates me. I fell into my beloved main languages, BASIC and 6502 Assembly, mostly because they were too entry-level for some stupid wizard to come & fuck up the learning experience. I could run a DOS program, write some text, and actually spit out... A Thing. That'd Work. Without having to install & navigate the hellscape that is an IDE to a beginner. If you can even fucking FIND a good one, and make it work right.
And it was nice, to see the Windows Program API explained in a way that... made sense, to my easily overwhelmed autistic computer woman brain, which never got the memo everyone else always had.