Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2

Alicorn

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

July Part 1

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

July Part 1

It seems there are those that get pointers, and the others.

Are there really people who don't get pointers? I'm having a hard time even imagining this. Pointers really aren't that hard, if you take a few hours to learn what they do and how they're used.

Alternately, is my reaction a sign that there really is a profoundly bimodal distribution of programming aptitudes?

I suspect it's like how my brain reacts to negative numbers, or decimals; I have no idea how anyone could fail to understand them. But some people do.

And, due to my tendency to analyse mistakes I make (especially factual errors) I remember the times when I got each one of those wrong. I even remember the logic I used.

But they've become so ingrained in my brain now that failure to understand them is nigh inconceivable.

6wedrifid16y

There really are people who would not take that few hours.

1rwallace16y

There is a difference in aptitude, but part of the problem is that pointers are almost never explained correctly. Many texts try to explain in abstract terms, which doesn't work; a few try to explain graphically, which doesn't work terribly well. I've met professional C programmers who therefore never understood pointers, but who did understand them after I gave them the right explanation. The right explanation is in terms of numbers: the key is that char *x actually means the same thing as int x (on a 32-bit machine, and modulo some superficial convenience). A pointer is just an integer that gets used to store a memory address. Then you write out a series of numbered boxes starting at e.g. 1000, to represent memory locations. People get pointers when you put it like that.

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Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2

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