(I know people get programming jobs without CS degrees, but if you can do that, you can teach yourself how pointers work)
How quickly could you pick it up if you had to?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointer_(computer_programmin...
I only used pointers in one specific context, while working for about 3 months on a Go codebase. I was able to get my code working without too much trouble, but pointers were a source of some headscratching for me out of ignorance and tbh I didn't work there long enough to fully learn or internalize it... I vaguely remember adding a * or & here or there to make things work.
I've been interested in some kind of class or learning reference for some of the more "CS" topics that I don't use but would still be nice to learn. I started an OSSU course or two but haven't made much progress since I get bored when they go over some fundamentals that I already feel confident on.
Not having a decent mental model of what’s happening a few levels below severely limits the kinda of problems you can solve.
I'm familiar with C/C++ and how pointers work, but that part of my mental knowledge never comes into play when I write python code, whether Django or not. And I've written substantial code in these two environments, they don't really intersect.
I mean, maybe once in a couple years you'd run into some weird problem that requires deep knowledge to solve, but "severely limits" might be a bit of an overstatement. (And might be some form of unwarranted gatekeeping IMHO.)
Everyone has limits/gaps in their knowledge, while C and pointers are part of the standard curriculum for CS degrees, not everyone has to be such cookie cutter devs (as long as they do their job and their employers are happy)
Developing an underlying mental model of what's actually happening is so much more effective than treating a programming language like a black box.
As far as "severely limits", there are many jobs where you could spend your entire wiring together libraries and asking more senior developers for help when you run into edge cases. But if you want to be one of those people who gets called in to help, you need a basic understanding of memory indirection. You don't need to understand pointer syntax in any specific language, but you need to have some understanding of what happens when you type x = [1,2,3].
At many tech companies, I doubt you could even make it passed the interview without a basic understanding of what a pointer is.
If you struggle with pointers and direct memory manipulation in C, you didn't understand Java nearly as well as you thought you did.
There's a distinction between reference and pointer in C++, but in Java they're basically the same thing with roughly the same semantics, up to and including the ability to be null.
You can't teach Joy to someone who has only programmed in JS any more than you can do the reverse. The difference is that we have a lot of people who have learned only algol derivatives and don't understand just how _weird_ the zoo of non-standard languages is.
And yeah, I believe that most developers can learn pointers and FP, sure, but on the side with pair programming and "mob programming", while still working a full time dev job?