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Let me get this off my chest: pointers are NOT hard. If every 16 year old with weed can talk about representation and meaning, every CompSci student can grok pointers.

Managing code with pointers is hard, but grasping the concept is easy.

Closures are far more confusing.

I didn't learn regular expressions for a very long time because people said they were hard. That was stupid. It took me a couple of days to get good at them.




Thanks for the excellent introduction to my next topic: An important function of programming education is to teach people which things other people often find difficult. Because intuition is not a reliable guide. And the secret to all effective communication -- which certainly includes programming, as well as writing and teaching -- is to write stuff that your audience can understand.

When the teacher says "this is tricky", consider the possibility that they aren't merely trying to motivate the students. It might just be a simple statement of fact: There's a significant population that doesn't get this at first glance, and you have to know that, regardless of whether you get it yourself or not.


> Thanks for the excellent introduction to my next topic: An important function of programming education is to teach people which things other people often find difficult.

Why? In my mind, managing student psychology is more important than conveying meta-facts. If a student will learn slower if you tell them that other people find something hard, then don't tell them that. As a bonus, the meta-fact might become less true.


> I didn't learn regular expressions for a very long time because people said they were hard.

I learned to use them long before I had any clue what a DFA was or had even heard of an accepting state. It was pretty intuitive to me that you just have to specify these patterns and it would match whatever you told it to.

When I later read more about the theory and how they were constructed in a compiler book, I wouldn't have been able to decipher a word of it if I hadn't already known how they were supposed to work.

I wonder why more books don't show you what they do before showing you how they're made.


"Closures are far more confusing."

IMO (obviously this is subjective) this is not true but it depends upon whether you mean confusing to use or confusing to understand the full implications of a thing under the hood.

Closures are pretty easy to start using for just about any halfway decent programmer if you lay off the theoretical underpinnings and just show them: here do this, and this will happen. Actually understanding how they function is another matter, but to just start using them is fairly simple assuming the language you are using supports them natively.

Pointers on the other hand are a fairly simple concept and unlike closures there is really no depth to the concept, but because most people's brains don't deal well with indirection beyond one level, pointers are very "tricky" when it comes to training your brain on how to use them correctly even after you understand the concept.

Closures are easy to use, hard to grok; pointers are easy to grok, hard to use, so which is more confusing depends a lot on what you mean by confusing.




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