I had a similar experience -- my buddy and I moved on from hypercard to "real" programming when he picked up a codewarrior compiler at a garage sale.

I remember sitting there trying to decide if we should try to figure out this weird C stuff or Pascal first. We ended up going with C. Probably a good choice, in retrospect.

It's hard to tell how much of it's "first love" nostalgia, but I remember codewarrior as being very simple, very fast, and very well designed.

Visual Studio and autotools were both quite a shock. (I still can't believe people use the autotools shit-chain. Ungodly terrible.)