I'd like to see more work like this. There are 1001 opinions on code style, but I've seen very little effort to objectively validate which pieces of common advice result in fewer defects.
Me too, but not so much with subjects that have just a couple of months experience with the language.
I'd prefer to identify things that still confuse programmers with, say, five years.
Things that confuse noobs contain a lot of noise. If we craft a coding convention based on that, we might end up with:
i = 1;
total = 0;
while (i <= 100) {
total = total + a[i - 1];
i = i + 1;
}