Writing increasingly sophisticated bots and trying to figure out what exactly would earn you a ban was my own first practical experience with coding.
I mostly managed to dodge bans on my most used accounts at the time, but interestingly when I checked back a year or two ago the majority had been permanently suspended. I wonder if they have some method of retroactively determining if someone was botting?
I got into programming at 14 because of writing scripts in Gemstone, a text based MMOMUD. Didn't even realize what I was doing was programming until college though...
I enjoyed reading this post. Cheers!