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How many developers in 2019 ever deal with pointers? Not saying it's unimportant, but I haven't used a language that directly exposed pointers since I last cod

• stcredzero 8y ago
  How many developers in 2019 ever deal with pointers? About the same proportion of them as drivers who deal with engines with pistons and lubrication systems. I would want a professional driver who can apply some basic understanding of what he's driving as opposed to one who thinks of the car as a bunch of magic stuff. (Back in the Ford model A days, some people used to hang garlic bulbs under the hood to "cure" their cars.) I haven't used a language that directly exposed pointers since I last coded anything serious in C, over 20 years ago. Then I hope you at least have a working knowledge of what an object reference is underneath and how it works. The problem with programmers who just think of an object reference as magic, is that they will lack the background to know when something like cache coherence might be an issue, or when they should worry about such a thing, and when they shouldn't bother. A programmer who doesn't have the foggiest idea won't even have a chance. One interviewee tried to tell me that having a certain variable in nearly every object be null would result in zero added memory. That could be true in Python. It would be false in C++ or Java. (We were using C++ at the time, at the interviewee's option.)