...and the judges couldn't shut it down, and so had to create a temporal bubble around the lab to contain it. They're still trapped inside.
Being able to move around your cursor and delete and edit things without leaving your home position can easily *double* your editing speed. That's the reason why people still love vi and Emacs. And this is not a joke.
Well almost. You still have to reach for the ESC key to switch between typing and moving the cursor. I find that slightly harder than reaching for the enter or backspace keys. You can train yourself to reach for it in a certain location, then find that when you switch to a laptop you keep hitting backquote or F1 instead.
The first algorithm I actually understood and was able to re-implement (in Sinclair Spectrum BASIC) was a bubble sort, so I would recommend that. I had been experimenting with the graphics functions for a couple of months before but I did not learn much from that. I think the important thing is to avoid pointers and also avoid dependence on any OO concepts (it's easy to forget how hard they were to learn.)
Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny. -- Frank Hubbard