Why the hell does anyone actually have trouble with this stuff?

I never really understood it, either.
I can't tell you how many people failed C because of pointers.

>>62429768
but they are literally just non-fluff variables. that's all they are. they're a reference to something useful elsewhere, just like variables. how the fuck can it be hard to grasp if you know what memory even is?

It's easy to have trouble when your teacher is from mainland china and you can only understand one out of every 11 words.

> No ownership indication
> Indirection abuse
> Different scopes are misleading
> Dangling pointers are common
> Inconsistent coding style (team issues)

The list goes on.

>>62429331
>>62429862
Most professors teaching programming treat pointers as some horribly abstract and difficult to grasp concept, which makes students think their simple intuition about what they actually are must be wrong, and they spend a ton of time confusing themselves by trying to understand the non-
existent deeper meaning of pointers.

Same goes for recursion.

>>62429911
If you can't self-teach pointers just give up now tbqh.

>>62429331
i had trouble with it at first, but once i visualised the concept and tried it out i managed to pick it up quickly

It's hard to understand if you never got to know what memory looks like and how it's structured when programs are ran.

Pointers are stupid desu senpai.

>MUH DYNAMIC MEMORY
>MUH ARRAYS

why? 99% of use cases for pointers could simply abstract them away and it'd be easier

File: 1419391357308.jpg (32KB, 596x285px) Image search: [Google]

32KB, 596x285px

>>62429331
Honestly i didnt really understand then until i saw pic related

>>62430012
>Most professors teaching programming treat pointers as some horribly abstract and difficult to grasp concept
well thats true... my own college prof did the same thing when introducing us to C. the only thing i couldnt understand was why he made such drama about something so elementary

File: what_is_the_output_anon.png (9KB, 309x290px) Image search: [Google]

9KB, 309x290px

>>62429331
The concept is pretty easy to understand but you can do abitrarily complex shit with them to confuse people.. I think pic related is the worst task my prof had put into an exam.

It's not 1985 anymore so we use proper languages with memory management and garbage collection instead of jacking off thinking you're superior for making a shitty version of it yourself. Pro tip, if you actually made anything outside of your hello worlds you would end up spending most of your time debugging. if you aren't using an OOP web framework by now there's almost a 200% chance you're a fucking loser that's never made a dime

>>62433323
>found the memory managementlet

can you point a floater in an array?

>>62433348
can you what what what??

>>62433332
Go find an ironic-unironic-ironic ASM shit and record each other racing to your graves.

>>62433323
>you're superior
of course I am

>>62429331
so many wrong things in that picture