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> I will never understand this trope of "pointers are hard to understand." Yes, they can get you in trouble if used without care. But hard to understand? What's
by camus2 9y ago
> I will never understand this trope of "pointers are hard to understand." Yes, they can get you in trouble if used without care. But hard to understand? What's so hard to understand about an address?
I don't think anybody ever said that pointers are hard to understand, they aren't. Go is a proof of this as even people coming from Python or Javascript can easily pick pointers up even if they have never heard about the heap and the stack before.
- ashark 9y agoThere are posters in this very discussion claiming that pointers were remarkably difficult to learn. I'm firmly in the "WTF is the big deal?" crowd. Every time I see posts like that I think, "maybe I've thought I understood pointers just fine, and even used them without issue, for years and years, but somehow I actually don't understand them?" I had a harder time with OO when I first encountered it than pointers, because I kept running into terrible "Sally wants to buy some lemonade from Tommy"-type introductions in crappy, cheap '90s C++/Java programming books and bouncing off it.
- khedoros1 9y ago> I had a harder time with OO when I first encountered it than pointers Pointers weren't too hard to learn (although, the deeper they're nested, the harder they are to think about, for me). OO felt immediately intuitive, using the "shape class, rectangle class, square class" examples. Recursion is the concept that I understood the general idea of, but had to do immense amounts of work to be able to visualize. I think that everyone has their own areas that they learn easily, that others have a hard time with.