I got started with programming as a teen in the 00’s. Tried to start with C++, but couldn’t make any sense of it. But then I tried BASIC running on a micro-controller doing simple stuff like blinking an LED. I think it was the perfect intro to programming—no OS to care about, simple language running on bare hardware running at 20MHz / 2KiB RAM. Sure it’s not a great language to actually do stuff in. But for learning the basics, it’s perfect.