Comment by troad

I'm basing my assumptions my own experience, both learning to code and teaching others to code, which isn't nothing to me, but may well be nothing to you. (No shade intended, that's totally valid.)

I would certainly be interested in the results of a study that put a simpler interpreter / compiler and a language reference in front of motivated non-programmers, but I strongly suspect that the amount of elegant tail recursion we'll see will be limited (and I'd very much expect there to be a correlation between that and a training in mathematics).

Imho, data comes from experiments, but experiments come from hypotheses, and hypotheses come from experience.