As developers know, pointers require you to work with a variable that points to another variable. It is one more level of indirection, and one needs to keep ad

As developers know, pointers require you to work with a variable that points to another variable. It is one more level of indirection, and one needs to keep additional information in short-term memory to understand the code. For whatever reason, a significant portion of students can't deal with it and give up. At the time, there were no "CSS expert" type of jobs to focus on instead. Perhaps Excel jockey or IT management as mentioned, but a different major entirely. Perhaps one reason is that the traditional C syntax for it is rather cryptic. Personally, first learned it in (Turbo) Pascal, which I found easy to learn (with its ^ syntax), and with that made learning it in C easier later.