Chris looked through files on his computer, deciding what to backup, found his Cpp code from 15 years ago.

It was his first every Cpp code that compiled for his college assignment.

His advice for new programmers is to ignore the advice of not learning a certain language, because there's always going to be problems with any language.

Just choose any language for your specific use case.

All you need to worry about is you're trying to write code, trying to get stuff up on the screen, change, mutating files.

What ever program you want it to be, as long as you're doing and learning, and hitting your head up against the wall, finding errors, and learning to debug, you're doing the right thing.

It's all time well spent. It's part of the process.

The second advice is to not get fixated on learning things the right way.

When you're starting out, it's more valuable to be making mistakes.

You should write spaghetti code more often, because you figure out what is bad code, why it is bad, and only then you try to emulate what is good code.

So get on your computer, open an IDE, and write some code.