Why do you say "should not have taken?" Given the fact that he was a student at the time, learning C++, I think it's perfectly understandable that he ran into

Why do you say "should not have taken?" Given the fact that he was a student at the time, learning C++, I think it's perfectly understandable that he ran into a "bang your head against the wall" type problem. Maybe it was his first real segfault debugging session. I doubt you solved your first real segfault in 5 minutes. Sure, I'd expect someone with a couple years' experience to be able to debug a simple segfault relatively quickly. But the only reason they'd be able to debug it quickly is because they've _painstakingly done it before_, and can draw from that experience.