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What are your programming hot takes?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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Not sure about here but is was a hot take on reddit:
Pointers are not that hard and really useful
I can’t imagine anyone but a total novice disagreeing with this.
I can understand finding pointers hard at first, but I can absolutely not understand trying to argue that they aren’t useful.
There were a lot of “pointer hard” memes back r/programmerhumor. Probably a lot of beginner's over there.
I guess I cheated by already having an understanding of how the computer works before starting C.
Pointers are absolutely hard for beginners, and it is arguably hard to learn when and where to actually use them properly
What is so difficult to learn about pointers? I am not a programmer, i just used to dabble in C++ and a bit of C# and java for school and now python for uni. I found pointers in c++ much more straightforward, then memorizing when a function is doing call by value or call by reference. I still hate java for doing it half half and not letting you do it differently.
They're easy when they work. If you screw up, you have to fold your brain in half to figure out what you're trying to do, what you've actually done, and what to do instead.
Nevermind the compiler throwing errors because the syntax is awful and it won't tell you what it expects.
Learning pointers feels like one of those things, if you’re physically capable of learning it, then it just takes having it explained in a certain way, or seeing a certain implementation and then it just clicks.