That's understandable. Youthful indiscretion is best forgotten.

I can still remember trying to deal with structured binary data in Perl, just because I didn't want to fiddle around with memory management in C. I'm not sure it was actually any less painful, and I ultimately abandoned that first attempt.

(Decades later, my "magnum opus" has been through multiple mental redesigns and unsatisfactory partial implementations. This time, for sure...)