[moron4hire]

It's often said that you won't be a programmer until you understand pointers, but my own experience was the other way around: I didn't understand pointers until after I had been programming in languages like C# and Java for a long time.

I had first started out in C, hacked around for a while, even made a few simple programs. But I wasn't ever able to get very far with it. My first Java app had me doing GUI programming right away and I was making things a lot faster than I could have ever done in C.

The problem was, there are two things a beginner needs to learn: how to solve problems with programming, and the particular programming language they are using. So I think it's best to keep one of those things very, very simple. And you tend to lose a lot of people from boredom if that thing is the types of problems you're solving. So we have to default to the language being simple.

Pointers and memory management are an implementation detail. They are important, but they aren't the job. The job is fulfilling requirements. Some days the requirements might be "fit inside this tiny box of memory", but it's far more likely to be "so, like, when I click on the link, the screen flickers. <you mean a new page loads?> Yeah, whatever, just make it stop flickering."