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Comment by ranger_danger | Hacker News Reader

I think it would help a lot if pointers were taught to people from the perspective of how they actually occupy memory, and what the value it stores in memory represents, and then how that value is an address that is followed when a pointer is "dereferenced", etc.

It seems a lot of people assume that pointers don't actually consume any memory and then get confused trying to understand it that way.

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Strong agreement.

I came at C after doing 6502 and 8086 assembler. Pointers just made sense because working with indirect addressing and understanding how things were stored in memory already made sense.

The way a lot of teachers teach it is plain trash. I was raking terrible grades in OCaml and C before a student showed me what I needed to know in 15 minutes, and then I would kill it in the remaining exams. Same thing happened to my 68000 course. It didn't happen with every teacher but still, some people really need to get some better pedagogy.

The running joke is that we assume that if you know something you can teach it which goes against everything academia believes in.

> The running joke is that we assume that if you know something you can teach it which goes against everything academia believes in.

What does academia believe, then? I don't know what the negation of "If you know something you can teach it" is.

That if you don't know something, then you can't teach it?

That if you know something you can't teach it?

That if you don't know something you can teach it?

I assume the pun is that education is a discipline like any other. Asking questions, gathering evidence, testing hypotheses, publishing, lecturing etc. Not to discredit people who are naturally fantastic at figuring things out along the way. It just isn't the systemic approach academia believes in.

!(a => b) == (!b => !a), thus "If you can't teach it, you don't know something.". :-)

It's obviously "If you don't know something, you can't teach it."

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