I'm a programmer who spends all day in Go working on backend systems, but came to it from Javascript, my first language. Pointers were one of the concepts that took me the longest to understand, even having dug into them previously in the context of V8's object implementation. So I for one am grateful for this article, and just passed it on to a recent bootcamp grad at my company. Hopefully it will accelerate his learning curve.
The first language I learned was QBasic, so when I started to learn C++, the concept of pointers was bizarre and took longer to learn than it should have, but after it finally clicked, it gave me a special love for pointers, the simplicity of C, and low-level programming in general.
While QBasic didn't have pointer types, it did have pointers in disguise (or rather, pointers without disguise, which are just memory addresses) - VARPTR, PEEK and POKE. As I recall, PEEK'ing and POKE'ing things was actually necessary to do many important tricks in QB, especially once you started playing with CALL INTERRUPT.
Regardless of whether they can be called programmers, we can not deny that they exist.
Even if you're a JS programmer, having no knowledge of pointers just shows you've never dug very deep into how your language works. Does JS pass by value? by reference? does it pass references by value? These are all things a JS programmer should know, and requires some knowledge of pointers.
Don't understand the downvote. Understanding javascript's closure (which is a core js feature even on the client) properly without understanding pointers seems like an impossible task to me.
The idea of reference is necessary, but pointers are an implementation detail. If you don't come from C, you can understand everything in JavaScript without knowing what pointers are. Many languages have references to mutable state without the peculiar details that make pointers what they are.
I'm really tired of people bashing Javascript to death. It's here, it's being used, wether you like it or not. Stop whining about it, please.
The constructive question here is: is there any way to make JavaScript stop being used (especially for tasks not related to webpages)?
Nope. Especially since many of us don't have piles of irrational hatred for it.