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What a joke. Things like this – and the rhetoric on his site – make systems programming look like more of a dark art than it actually is. If you're a programme

What a joke. Things like this – and the rhetoric on his site – make systems programming look like more of a dark art than it actually is. If you're a programmer, should know how your computer works; if pointers are too "hard" for you, you're in the wrong business. You're settling for mediocrity and belittling your own intelligence by assuming you're not capable of tackling this stuff the same way everyone else has.

angrycoder 16y ago
I dunno, I have a lot respect for people who take difficult concepts and try to make them easier to grasp. Teachers are more valuable than belittlers. "This isn't hard" is not a lesson plan or a path to enlightenment.
- rogerclark 16y ago
  I also have a lot of respect for people who are willing to teach. But I don't respect teachers that speak of these concepts like they're magic that no mere mortal can understand. This is stuff that everyone can know -- and should know -- and needs to be treated like learning arithmetic, not tensor calculus.
noarchy 16y ago
How many programmers today do not know what what a pointer is, or even if they do, how to use/understand them? I'm sure the number is growing, considering the prevalence of languages where pointers aren't even a consideration. Now if you don't like the features of this IDE, that's fair. You're free to stick to whatever you're currently using. Given that Tenacious C will be a paid app when it is done, I doubt I'll really be interested, given what I can use for free that gets the job done more than adequately.
- philbo 16y ago
  Gah, I can't remember the details now, but I'm sure one of the interviewees in Coders At Work talks about this point. Something about how the notion of pointers/references is fundamentally wrong because it doesn't reflect our understanding of objects in RL. I realise I'm being tangential now, but thought I'd mention it anyway.
jrockway 16y ago
My thoughts exactly. Pointers are one of the easier "computer science concepts". Instead of storing the entire value right here, we just store where in memory that is. That's all. The side-effects are also relatively simple. Since we're just passing around memory addresses, anything (including called functions) can modify it, since they just write to that memory. If you can't understand that, I don't see how you are going to write a computer program. The deeper issues are things like object lifetimes, call-by-value versus call-by-reference semantics, and so on.

angrycoder 16y ago

I dunno, I have a lot respect for people who take difficult concepts and try to make them easier to grasp. Teachers are more valuable than belittlers. "This isn't hard" is not a lesson plan or a path to enlightenment.

rogerclark 16y ago
I also have a lot of respect for people who are willing to teach. But I don't respect teachers that speak of these concepts like they're magic that no mere mortal can understand. This is stuff that everyone can know -- and should know -- and needs to be treated like learning arithmetic, not tensor calculus.

noarchy 16y ago

How many programmers today do not know what what a pointer is, or even if they do, how to use/understand them? I'm sure the number is growing, considering the prevalence of languages where pointers aren't even a consideration. Now if you don't like the features of this IDE, that's fair. You're free to stick to whatever you're currently using. Given that Tenacious C will be a paid app when it is done, I doubt I'll really be interested, given what I can use for free that gets the job done more than adequately.

philbo 16y ago
Gah, I can't remember the details now, but I'm sure one of the interviewees in Coders At Work talks about this point. Something about how the notion of pointers/references is fundamentally wrong because it doesn't reflect our understanding of objects in RL. I realise I'm being tangential now, but thought I'd mention it anyway.

jrockway 16y ago

My thoughts exactly. Pointers are one of the easier "computer science concepts". Instead of storing the entire value right here, we just store where in memory that is. That's all. The side-effects are also relatively simple. Since we're just passing around memory addresses, anything (including called functions) can modify it, since they just write to that memory. If you can't understand that, I don't see how you are going to write a computer program. The deeper issues are things like object lifetimes, call-by-value versus call-by-reference semantics, and so on.