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I'm not sure how relevant it is today but one litmus test I found years ago was how naturally they grasped the concept of a pointer. If a programmer grokked poi
by throwawayboise 6y ago
I'm not sure how relevant it is today but one litmus test I found years ago was how naturally they grasped the concept of a pointer. If a programmer grokked pointers that was a good indicator that s/he was on the path to being a good programmer. It's probably just a proxy for being able to think at a level of indirection.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- setpatchaddress 6y agoThis was one reason I thought programming the classic Mac was great training — the nature of the memory manager, where most data structures were double-indirected pointers and the inner pointer could move at will -— you had to understand pointers or you’d never be able to produce a stable program. Edit to add: and yeah, I’m also not sure it’s relevant outside OS-level programming, which most people never get near at this point.