>>>>What about some sort of "program" to allow younger aspiring programmers the availability of an "advisor", to get past some of the road blocks that hindered us all.
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>>As long as I had employees other than myself, I hired apprentices / CO:OP students from the local university. These students were exposed to every aspect of our operation -- local mini computer, local area networks, programming in the real world ( 1 project in COBOL for mainframe customers, then a project in xbase language for PC network computer customers, etc ). This takes an agressive position, bucks to spend on a program which potentially may not "make it", and yes, a lot of time sharing. We offered partial / full tuition for local University classes, in-house video, and mentoring by being physically located in the "bull pen" with senior type programmers always available -- with management approved sharing of ideas. Still maintain some contact with several of these interns, and they seemed to have benefited by the broad range of experience. Am I claiming sainthood? Nope.
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>I'm glad somebody finally addressed the issue of mentoring. I think that I always felt that if I had had some kind of programming mentor I could have avoided a lot of hurdles that really slowed me down. Ofcourse I started fairly late programming. I would guess the average age of programmers today is probably about 13,14. I've seen a lot of kids get frustrated fairly early and give up programming. Some of these kids had real potential. It would be nice to see some form of mentoring program for young programmer's.
In 1964, during the mad rush for the moon, I was a 17 year old high school student from Ohio who spent the summer of 1964 at NYU ( the Bronx -- talk about change of culture ? ? ? ). I cut my teeth on an IBM 1620 with a massive 64K of RAM and a 1 megabyte hard disk for the FORTAN compiler. We got our lectures like the other college students, got our assignments and were offered almost unlimited batch run time on the computer. Average size program was 20 punched cards ( visit the Smithsonian sometime ) and turnaround from submission to punched card output was 10 - 15 minutes. This compared quite favorably to the hours spent on a rotary calculator / slide rule / book of logarithm tables. I have felt a debt of gratitude for the opportunity, since it opened my horizons immensely.