[Contero]

I'm curious what exactly it is about pointers that makes them so hard to understand.

Many new programmers seem to warm up to Java "references" just fine, and they have mostly the same semantics of C pointers.

Maybe it's because passing by value is conceptually harder to grasp than passing by reference, and in C you must understand both in order to use pointers?

[coldtea]

That, and using pointers with memory management (which in Java is GC and transparent to you), and the confusing syntax p++ vs (p)++ etc.