In 1975 at Durham Technical College, Framwellgate Moor Campus we were extremely lucky that someone had decided to have computer science as one of the modules on an O.N.D science course.
Thus there I was one day, using a sort of typewriter that put holes into IBM cards, so that the FORTRAN IV code I was typing could be run.That involved stacking the cards into a hopper.
Subsequently i went to University to study biology and it wasn't for quite some time that I got back into computing as a hobby. I actually value the fact that I'm not clever enough to be in the same ball park as Richard Stallman, since it enables me not to loose site of the sort of issues that those relatively new to computers find an issue. The really clever guys just assume, that code instructions are so simple and obvious everybody when they were born would know them. They thus tend to leave out crucial information, which you actually need and will get stuck without.
I can tell you that a lot of my approach involves trial and error until i find it works. Currently and technically I maintain the latex2html install slackbuild script for slackware linux