Comment by jhall1468 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhall1468 | Hacker News Reader

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> For some reason most people seem to be born without the part of the brain that understands pointers

Well, that's just false. Everyone can understand pointers given both time and interest. I realize Joel likes to think him and people like him are "special" and born with innate super powers, but we have overwhelming evidence that it isn't true.

I certainly wouldn't recommend hiring someone to write embedded systems that don't understand pointers, but if you are hiring a generalist, a good engineer can figure it out if it becomes a job requirement down the road.

These are the reasons literally everything Joel says should be taken with the biggest grain of salt you can find. He seems like a smart dude, but like a lot of smart dudes that are aware of their intelligence he highly overestimates (and overvalues) his particular opinions.

My advice: don't be like Joel and use anecdata to drive your theories on what constitutes a good interview. You're already writing exactly like he does, and that's not beneficial to you or to those you're interviewing.

> Well, that's just false. Everyone can understand pointers given both time and interest.

I'd like to believe that's true, but I've spent quite a lot of time trying to explain pointers and recursion to people and either they get it right away or practically never. Sometimes they end up with some cargo-culted half-way understanding that lets them solve most problems but they still don't seem to understand what's happening. Joel is a bit pompous, that's true, but there definitely are people who cannot understand pointers when taught in a normal CS course, and if 4 years of university didn't teach them pointers I don't think they'll get them while programming in the field.

As an aside, the fact that some people can't grok some things shouldn't be controversial. I myself can't understand lots of things and probably would never understand them in the way that people who grok them instantly do. People have different modes of thinking, and I do not doubt that there exist people who cannot grasp pointers and recursion in the same intuitive way that I do. That doesn't make them less smart in general, but it does mean they're a bad fit for e.g. a C programmer position.

Speaking for myself, I was the person Joel described except that I didn't switch majors. The pointer wall first struck at the tail end of my HS years and then crushed me early on my Freshman year of college. It took me a couple of years but I finally wrapped my head around pointers. It could be that I really do fall into your half-way camp, but I don't think that's the case.

I was a terrible student more interested in playing games than doing any actual work, so that I'm sure was a large part in the problem being "years" instead of "months", but either way it was something I learned and not something I was just born with.

I do agree that for any person there will be things that they get right away and things that they'll never get. But I think those vary more than people realize.

> I'd like to believe that's true, but I've spent quite a lot of time trying to explain pointers and recursion to people and either they get it right away or practically never.

Have you thought about may be you don't understand pointers and just think you do ? May be you should not start teaching and explaining about pointers before you understand it well. If you can't pin-point why your students don't understand and just say they won't understand at all (may be weak math background or something else), then I'm sorry you lack the knowledge to teach or use pointers.

It's not controversial that different topics are difficult for different people, but the idea of "innate" understanding is absurd. And the idea that code quality has a direct causal relationship to code quality is even more absurd. He certainly didn't qualify that statement to imply C programmers have lousy code when they don't understand pointers, but how many people that struggle with pointers want to jump on that ship anyway?

End of the day, learning its a personal thing, and some people struggle in some topics and not in others, but under no circumstances do I think there's an innate ability to understand pointers and some people are never going to have it. That just sounds like C programmers trying to pet their ego.

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