Anecdote follows. The below matters little.

I did the same gradual move, and I can remember being excited to get home from school because I might have solved some problem by letting it tick over in my head.

But I do remember thinking GML was amazing (it was fugly, kid), and struggling with C, because the language was so different. (These days, leap to love2D and Lua instead).

Just the idea of multiple languages was so foreign and impossible to me. Writing a raycaster in GML was possible, writing an event loop in C was insane... And these days picking up a language tutorial for something new is a hobby.