nytpu on Nostr: I honestly don't know why everyone portrays pointers as the most complicated thing a ...

I honestly don't know why everyone portrays pointers as the most complicated thing a beginner programmer could possibly need to understand. Like yeah, there are uses of them that are complicated, but the basics seems really really trivial to me (I understood it within an hour when I first taught myself C). I guess if it's your first exposure to needing to know when to use meaningless characters as operators (* and &) then maybe I can sorta see it?

IMHO & IME, languages like Python that always use pass-by-reference are a lot harder for a beginner to reason about, because you get shit like “if you assign a variable to another and then ‘change’ the new variable, then it changes the original variable too since they both reference the same object. *Except* if you reassign instead of mutate the variable. And except for this arbitrary [to a beginner] set of things that are copied for no reason [to a beginner], but even though they got copied we still say it's ‘pass-by-reference’.”