Comment by diegof79
4 days ago
Understanding the concept is easy.
The problem arises when you start to mix memory management with more complex structures.
It’s extremely easy to make mistakes, and you must be very careful about ownership and clean up. Those things are not strictly related to pointers, but in C, it’s inevitable to use pointers to handle them. That's why people say pointers are hard.
Yeah, it's one thing to understand "a pointer is a location in memory". It's a completely different things to understand what to do with that information.
When I first started learning to program, it was in C, with one of those "Sam's Learn Yerself a C++ in Eleventy-Three Days" books. I was, like, 15 or something. This was long enough ago and my family was just barely poor enough that we didn't even have the Internet yet.
The book explained memory. That was not hard to understand. But we had been using stack-allocated variables through several chapters in the book so far. I didn't get why you would ever want anything as a pointer. If I wanted to write a program to add 3 and 5, why wouldn't I just say "int x = 3;"? Why bother with this stupid dereferencing syntax? Given that the author chose to explain pointers by first explain the address-of operator on stack allocated variables, it felt particularly perverse. The regular, ol' variables were right there! Why but just use them
I didn't have a concept yet of what one could even do with programming. Hell, just a few years prior to that point, I was pretty sure all of the other programs on my computer were written by massive teams of wizards manually typing out 1s and 0s.
I still managed to bungle on and write code. But my programs in C never really worked well. Though, they still worked better than my classmates' versions! Then, in my 2nd year of college, I had transferred universities and the new place taught in a Java.
Java was disgusting. It was so verbose. Why did we need all these weird, multi-sylabic, period-infested function calls to do anything? Why was it so slow? Why couldn't I write ASCII-art graphics with it? Why couldn't I run my programs on my friend's computer?
It wasn't until I had taken computer architecture that I gained a much better understanding of what any of all these computer things were meant to do. I ended up implementing a basic scripting language in Java. And then, suddenly, I understood pointers.