Rant: a guy at a library in Dayton showed me my code was fine, my setup was not
I went to a free intro to Python class at the Dayton library last Tuesday and spent 40 minutes stuck on a program that kept giving me errors. The guy next to me, maybe 70 years old, looked over and asked if I had saved the file before running it. I had not. He said he had been writing little scripts for 15 years and still hits that same problem once a week, and he showed me how to turn on autosave so it stops. It sounds so dumb but it fixed three of my four errors that night. For the people here who teach or mentor, do you warn beginners about the save button first, or let them learn it the hard way like I did?
Teach the save button in the first five minutes, no question. I've watched grown adults nearly cry over code that was actually perfect, and nine times out of ten it's just unsaved changes or a file saved somewhere weird. Tell them to hit Ctrl+S before they run anything, every single time, and you'll save everyone a lot of grief.