I don't know, I kind of stopped reading when the author said that understanding pointers and recursion makes someone gifted in programming. Those are really just fundamentals.
In an era of coding bootcamps that claim to compress a 4-year CS degree into 4-10 weeks of adrenaline-fueled CSS/HTML/JS/Ruby memorization, and deem their graduates programmers, it seems like many people follow that sentiment.
I believe this kind of thinking is not so much harmful as laughable - in my experience studying programming has been an exercise in learning about the existence of more and more complex topics I don't understand yet. First it was OOP, then design patterns, then functional programming, and now I'm glancing over the horizon towards type theory, language theory, etc.
Getting pointers and recursion are very, very, early steps (though hard ones!) on a long journey.
[0] s/boys/girls s/men/women
With OS and applications programming, you typically have to know a handful of concepts, but you have to know them really well. With web programming, you typically have to know a lot -- it can be an obnoxiously broad field of practice -- but you don't have to know it all perfectly well. CSS or JS or PHP or Python or Ruby or what-have-you generally immediately works or doesn't work, you generally don't encounter those annoying null ptr situations.
I doubt there are a lot of C programmers that could do web development (front and back end) very well. I doubt there are a lot of web developers that could do OS development very well.
But it's all just programming.
All of software development would be a hell of a lot better environment if people would quit waving their egos around.
Today there are a lot of people "learning to code" from other backgrounds. There are Marketing majors who follow the HTML -> CSS -> JS -> Ruby path that you mention. Good for them to start the path. Picking up recursion is an advanced topic for them - and good for them. It's all relative to the starting point. And I hope many of these folks stick it out to get good, because Stanford and MIT aren't churning out enough people to satisfy the demand.
All of the bolded items seemed extremely accurate. Especially for people I've worked with, those early in their career can really struggle with them. I'd love it if they took these lessons to heart.
Thus the title/subtitle:
> Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code; And what I’ve learned from teaching others