Nothing really surprising to me, but the burnout rate really worries me.

Also having only 5% females in the field is a shame, would love to see that increased over the next decade.

Not sure how to help you with this, since that will change with what you want to archive in the loop. But maybe writing it in pseudo code might help:

For each letter in the word

for letter, position in enumerate(word):

You want to check if your guess is the letter

if letter == guess:

If it is you want to add the letter to your display , exactly on the position it is in the original word

display[position] = letter

Does that kind of thinking help?

I think the other guys have already explained it quite well, but here are some more goodies that might interest you.

Your first attempt of filling the display is the more pythonic way in my opinion and it works, so instead of initializing an empty array and the filling it, just use display = ["_"]*word_length

Also for evaluating if the guess is in the word, there is a very nice iterator called enumerate, that hands you two values, the index and the actual value of the item, so you can use it like this:

for position, letter in enumerate(chosen_word):
    if letter == guess:
        display[position] = letter

Also, to play the full game you want to surround your guessing part with a while loop, so you can keep guessing until you have found the word. For this you will have to create a list of characters that resemble your chosen_word. There are several ways to do so and I will try to explain some of them.

Here we are using the unpacking asterisk, that unpacks each character of your string into an item in the list

while (display != [*chosen_word]):
    guess = input("Guess a letter: ").lower()

    for position, letter in enumerate(chosen_word):
        if letter == guess:
            display[position] = letter
    print(display)

Another way would be explicitly casting the string into a list with the list function like this:

while (display != list(chosen_word)):

Last but not least we could use something like list comprehension, which is seen as very pythonic but a bit weird to look at when you are not used to it.

while (display != [letter for letter in chosen_word]):

What this essentially does is the same as creating a for loop and filling a list like this, but more comprehensive:

chosen_word_list = []
for letter in chosen_word:
    chosen_word_list.append(letter)

W3Schools has some nice info about list comprehension. It is a rather advanced concept though so don’t let it bother you if you don’t get it right away.

Happy coding :)

Disagree on this one, even though I can see where you are coming from. I first learnt programming in Java, and it gave me massive problems to understand the structure and typings. Obviously Java isn’t the most beautiful language anyways, but once I picked up python it started to click for me on how to solve problems, because I didn’t have to think about that many things. I could just go for it. Yes, my code was messy in the beginning, but I wasn’t working on any important projects. It was just for fun.

So I think learning how to solve problems is as important as writing clean code. And python really helped me with that.