The first games I made were in QBASIC for MSDOS. I felt super cool making a 40x25 text-based puzzle game. Then I felt like a loser when I jumped on the internet (this was way back in '95) and found a QBASIC site that had all of these killer games in 256 colors with sprites and 3D. It was gutting. I never did learn to do any of that PEEK/POKE assembly-ish stuff. I always felt too dumb to understand it.
So from then on I sorta use 'middle ware', which I guess nowdays is called 'engines' or 'tools' or whatever (stuff like GameMaker and Pico8). My first project in something like that was actually a couple of pinball games made in Visual Pinball, which uses a customized visual basic script to control table elements and track events (like Bumper.Bump() etc.). I still hate most languages since they're text-based. Where's all this processor power going? I keep hoping there's someone who's like me and understands the fundamentals of how programming works but makes it powerful yet simple so game design is less about the technical stuff and more about game logic itself. I was quite impressed with Arcade Game Studio's approach to AI scripting, where it used almost a music-type sequencer, with each row being a 'kind' of event, such as movement, turn on/off flags for collision, etc. and then the topmost row would jump to the different columns on events or set it to only happen for a certain amount of time or event. It was so easy to just try out all kinds of ideas, mixing and matching a fairly robust set of 'baseline rules'.
I went off on a tangent. I'm hoping a dev reads this deep down and one day thinks about the problem of solving problems from different points of view. I've never gotten on with 'coding' proper and find it tedious and boring...it's like being into photography and the only thing anyone else wants to talk about is lenses and FSTOP and such and you're like, 'I'm into framing and subject matter'. It's not as if that other stuff isn't necessary, but in the end, if capture the subject matter properly, that's what actually counts to people you show the photo to, not whether you used a Nikon or Cannon. No one cares.