Advice to new programmers
I love the simple software-centric approach to analyzing this survey and categorizing the answers.<p>There&#x27;s one thing I&#x27;m sure was mentioned a lot by 17.1% of the participants, but it&#x27;s one thing I&#x27;d like to stress:<p>Find a good mentor!<p>I&#x27;ve been teaching my son programming steadily for a few years now, and every so often he likes to take what he just learned, go and revisit some old programs he wrote or read from before he understood the new concept, and understand it better and often improve on it a lot (even rewriting it sometimes), and then he comes back to me very excitedly telling me how the new concept I taught him greatly improved the thing he did.<p>He&#x27;s already writing code better than I did when I was a decade older than him, easily grasping new concepts like linked lists, garbage collection, pointers, and Lua coroutines and so on. When I was his age, I was still struggling to understand arrays in QBasic, had nobody to mentor and guide and teach me, and was generally pretty lost. Having a mentor who can guide you carefully and at your pace is an incredibly powerful shortcut.