I'm not terribly convinced that this isn't a skill. It might be a skill that's difficult to acquire, and perhaps a skill that's difficult to retain or even be really good at. And maybe some people are just better at thinking about really weird problems.
But pointers aren't a hard concept, and probably everyone has used a pointer at one point in their life, without realizing that's what they were doing.
a href? Pointer
Library card catalog? Pointer
Yellow Pages? Pointer
Address book? Pointer
Table of contents? Pointer
Index? Pointer
The problem is that most people who understand pointers don't do a good job of teaching what pointers are.
I agree with you. In my opinion, pointers scare starters because of their bad reputation. In reality, the scary thing of pointers is that the errors they produce are difficult to track and debug, so you need some solid good practices.
But conceptually, they are not more difficult to understand than other data types out there.
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I'm not terribly convinced that this isn't a skill. It might be a skill that's difficult to acquire, and perhaps a skill that's difficult to retain or even be really good at. And maybe some people are just better at thinking about really weird problems.
But pointers aren't a hard concept, and probably everyone has used a pointer at one point in their life, without realizing that's what they were doing.
a href? Pointer
Library card catalog? Pointer
Yellow Pages? Pointer
Address book? Pointer
Table of contents? Pointer
Index? Pointer
The problem is that most people who understand pointers don't do a good job of teaching what pointers are.
I agree with you. In my opinion, pointers scare starters because of their bad reputation. In reality, the scary thing of pointers is that the errors they produce are difficult to track and debug, so you need some solid good practices.
But conceptually, they are not more difficult to understand than other data types out there.