When I was a kid, probably around 7 years old, my parents bought a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computer, on sale from Gemco. They got it to do household accounting, but the available apps were not really suited for the task. So my dad set out to try to write his own apps in TI BASIC.
In the process of trying to teach himself TI BASIC, but I didn't know anything about it. All I knew was that there was a prompt to type commands. But nothing I typed seemed to do anything except give me a syntax error. I didn't even know what that meant.
I asked my dad if the computer could draw Pac-Man because I really wanted to play that game. He told me it didn't have that capability and I'd have to tell it how.
So it got me thinking what kind of conversation I would have.
Me: Draw a Pac-Man.
Computer: What's a Pac-Man?
Me: It's like a pizza with a piece missing.
Computer: What's a pizza?
Me: It's a kind of food.
Computer: What is food?
Me: It's something that you eat.
Computer: What is eat?
Me: It's the thing you do with food.
As a seven-year-old, I thought that if I could find a way to have this kind of conversation, eventually I'd be able to explain to the computer what I wanted it to do.
I started typing the words from my books into the TI BASIC prompt. It never seemed to get any smarter.
Eventually I discovered a more realistic conceptualization of what computers were capable of. I taught myself TI BASIC by trial an error. Mostly, I'd input the examples from the books we had, and tweak them here and there.
All of my programs were extremely simple. I even eventually figured out how to get it to display a Pac-Man. But by then, I realized that showing a picture of something is many orders of complexity removed from actually designing a video game.