That’s almost exactly how I got started, except instead of Turbo C++ and Turbo Pascal it was whatever free or bootleg programming language I could get my hands on. I remember when I first learned Java I used an online compiler where you just plopped your code in a text box, then I found some compiler called not javac, but jc. I pointed it at the directory for the Java class library in Netscape and I was off to the races lol