> I myself didn't really consider how I could use code to speed up mundane tasks until I was forced to copy files over from an embedded Linux system over bash. The introduction from "open up a terminal, and type these commands in, which does these things" to "now just put those commands in a file called script.sh and type ./script.sh, and it will do the thing automatically" was eye-opening, at 22 years old. Looking back, it's the exact same problem that resulted in a company I used to work for doing 100s of GB of data processing in Excel, because writing Excel macros was more accessible than writing a bash script to append two .csv files.
I mean, Linux specifically isn't really necessary for this. Back in the early-mid 00s, OS X got me into terminal usage and "real" programming via its free (as in beer), full-octane bundled dev tools and included Ruby installation.
In fact, at the point that I got into these things with OS X, I had already tinkered with a Linux variant (Yellow Dog) and had given up before getting too far because I didn't have the knowhow to make the OS as a whole work properly, and worse, the internet resources needed to fill this knowledge gap didn't make themselves obvious.