I first learned to program during my freshman year of high school. Me and a friend of mine suddenly got an insatiable desire to learn all we could about computers. We did most of our experimentation on school computers for some reason. Every day, we got to first period Computer Apps class 15 minutes early, logged on and started screwing around. We started out with simple stuff. We figured out how to unlock the command prompt and wreak havoc by shutting down networked computers, and we thought we were so smart. Then we got into batch files. We didn't know at the time that we were actually programming however. Later we started tinkering with VBS and we had some good fun with that. Then one day my friend showed up with a CD with something called Python on it. He had been messing with it over the weekend, and started learning it. I thought it was pretty neat, so I started learning it too. And it began a long and wonderful relationship which continues to this day between me and Python, which is still my favorite language.

Slax, Linux Mint, Crunchbang, and finally settled (as much as one can settle on a distro) on Debian