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Comment by codesushi42 | Hacker News Reader

You don't use recursion or pointers professionally? On what world are you considered a real world programmer?

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. I realize you might have just intended it as a rhetorical question, not a personal attack, but the internet doesn't do such fine distinctions. Please just keep away from that rail.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13596131 and marked it off-topic.

There's no need to be rude.

Also, I think the idea is that those concepts are common enough that you'd either be searching for some specific nuance of implementation, or not searching at all.

I mean, I don't search for "for loop in Javascript" but I like to think I program in the real world. I might search for "Angular foreach options" or something like that, though.

Too bad that's a straw man since the comment you replied to didn't say anything about not using pointers and resursion. It said real programmers don't ask that many questions about them.

Also too bad for your high horse answer that all the best real world programmers acknowledge that pointers & recursion are places where bugs hide disproportionately. Many real world programmers suggest that pointers & recursion are things to avoid. NASA's safety code guidelines are well known around here because it says explicitly to avoid both recursion and pointers.

Rule #1: "Restrict all code to very simple control flow constructs – do not use goto statements, setjmp or longjmp constructs, and direct or indirect recursion."

Rule #9: "The use of pointers should be restricted. Specifically, no more than one level of dereferencing is allowed. Pointer dereference operations may not be hidden in macro definitions or inside typedef declarations. Function pointers are not permitted."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_D...

The one where I've done it as a career for the last 15 years (and as a hobby/side career for a few years before that).

I've not touched a pointer directly in the last 10 and infrequently enough before that.

Just not much call for them in Python, JavaScript and PHP.

Do I have to hand in my Real World Programmer(TM) badge at the door or something?.

How very dare you! All real programming involves pointers! How shall you mutate that variable without using another 4kb of ram without pointers!

In all seriousness, I love c and c++, and go, and rust, but most real world apps can currently be done quite performantly without touching pointers, or using a language that exposes them.

Pretty much this and two of the three languages I use regularly have the ability to call into a language that does use them so if I ran into a case where I needed more speed (and throwing hardware at it wasn't the cheapest approach which it often is) I could use something like C for that.

I'd be rusty as hell though, I haven't written any C or assembly since ~1999.

I have extra pointers. I could lend you some. Although, in my defense, some of them don't point to legal memory, so YMMV.

"On what world are you considered a real world programmer?"

Probably in a world, where people can read ...

In most of today "real world" languages you can't use pointers.

If you can get NullPointerException, then you are using pointers. May be you meant that you can't use pointer arithmetic, but pointers are used almost everywhere.

If you can't use pointer arithmetic, you don't use pointers. Your language uses them internally, but not you. NullPointerException in Java/C# is a result of a leaky abstraction.

> If you can't use pointer arithmetic, you don't use pointers.

Is it someone's definition of pointer?

> Your language uses them internally, but not you.

I'm actively using pointers that point to object.

> NullPointerException in Java/C# is a result of a leaky abstraction.

I don't agree. Java has uses pointers (which also called references and those are synonyms for Java), Java has concept of null pointer and I don't see why NullPointerException is leaky abstraction.

It is wikipedia[1] definition of pointer.

> In computer science, a pointer is a programming language object, whose value refers to (or "points to") another value stored elsewhere in the computer memory using its memory address.

> [2] Pointers are the most primitive. Due to their intimate relationship with the underlying hardware, they are one of the most powerful and efficient types of references. Pointer "points to memory", so if you change value of a pointer, you change what memory it points to. In java you can't change what a pointer points to. It's only references.

> I'm actively using pointers that point to object.

No, you passively use references that point to object. You can't do *(ptr+1) in java. Leaky abstraction means that it's called a pointer but it isn't a real pointer. Also as another commenter said, in C# it's properly called a reference.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointer_(computer_programming) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_(computer_science)#E...

Of course you can change the value of pointer in Java, just assign any other address. Even if I can't do pointer arithmetic in Java, they are still pointers, just without pointer arithmetic.

Yeah, they could just as easily have made it a NullException and not lost any meaning.

Or better yeah, they could have made a null safe language ;)

That is just a name, decided before Java settled on a consistent terminology. In C# it is NullReferenceException.

We get into nitpicking, but I would argue references and pointers are not the same. Pointer are by definition memory addresses, while references are opaque and could be addresses under the hood.

Note also that C# does have pointers, but they are separate from references.

Well, memory address is a memory address and pointer is a pointer. You can have virtual function pointer in C++, which is much more than just a memory address, it's a complex value, yet it's called a function pointer. If you're using that definition then yes, but I don't think that everyone uses it. For me pointer is an entity which points to some value, the key is an indirection, not an implementation. I think, that even C++ would allow compiler to implement pointers as something opaque (e.g. for safety).

But in those cases you would hardly expect a Stackoverflow question tagged with "pointers".

Most by number possibly, rather than by market share.

Must be using C++ with references instead of pointers. Or perhaps variadic templates where you don't explicitly recurse - the compiler does the peeling of parameters for you...

I chuckled. I think OP and others in the thread completely missed the point.

If you use a language with references, you're using pointers. I never said pointer arithmetic, dereferencing etc.

Same with recursion. Yeah, implementing recursive calls in a language like Java is dumb. But tail recursion isn't. Nor is using an equivalent of a recursive algorithm using a stack or queue.

If you don't think about these things, or don't know whether you do... you may be writing PHP

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