The worst was learning the machine language Assembler on punched cards. Hundreds of cards for a simple program... and if you dropped the deck and the cards fell out of order, you were screwed.
I guess as a comparison, my first computer had the equivalent of 256 ‘punched cards’, as that was all the RAM I had available.
https://www.retrotechnology.com/restore/6800D2.html
I still have it, and last time I checked, it still worked.