Comment by 1n3nt0r

Sadly my first exposure to programming was in FORTRAN on a mainframe (when I took a summer course at a college in 8th grade). I could not initially make heads or tails out of fortran or the imperative approach, but I knew it was magical. Eventually bought a VIC-20 and other computers later.

By the time I was ready to start college was well versed in a number of (imperative) programming languages, data structures, algorithms, etc. However was exposed to SICP in college and fell in love with both the book and emerging functional languages (this was the late 80s).

SICP remains my favorite CS / programming book of all time.