(Just in case what I'm about to say makes anyone squirm—I promise this code was for personal use and should never have been used in production!) I first starte

(Just in case what I'm about to say makes anyone squirm—I promise this code was for personal use and should never have been used in production!) I first started dabbling in C programming because I was coming across (open source) software that did everything I wanted save for one or two small problems, and I wanted to make changes. I'd only worked with higher-level languages in the past, and so I quickly discovered that I had no idea what to do with pointers. I understood what they were, conceptually, but not when or why to use them within these large existing codebases. So, um, I basically just started doing whatever the compiler said to. When I used the wrong symbol for a variable, the IDE displayed a warning, and I'd cycle through the possibilities (foo, *foo, &foo, **foo, etc) until the warning went away. Somewhat to my own surprise, this strategy absolutely worked—I can't recall a time when it led to a problem. ...and I'm not sure that's a good thing. It was certainly helpful, but I didn't learn anything.