BenVimes

I doubt that you're missing anything about pointers themselves. I may not have done a good job articulating why non-programmers have a hard time understanding them.

I am but one man whose only education in programming was a first year university course in C from almost two decades ago (and thus I am liable to completely botch any explanation of CS concepts and/or may just have faulty memories), but I can offer my own opinion.

Most basic programming concepts I was taught had easily understood use cases and produced observable effects. There were a lot of analogous concepts to algebra, and functions like printf did things that were concrete and could be immediately evaluated visually.

Pointers, on the other hand, felt designed purely of and for programming. Instead of directly defining a variable by some real-world concept I was already familiar with, it was a variable defined by a property of another variable, and it took some thinking to even comprehend what that meant. Even reading the Wikipedia page today I'm not sure if I completely understand.

Pointers also didn't appear to have an immediate use case. We had been primarily concerned with using the value of a variable to perform basic tasks, but none of those tasks ever required the location of a variable to complete the calculations. We were never offered any functions that used pointers for anything, either before or after, so including them felt like busywork.

It also didn't help that my professor basically refused to offer any explanation beyond a basic definition. We were just told to arbitrarily include pointers in our work even though they didn't seem to contribute to anything, and I really resented that fact. We were assured that we would eventually understand if we continued to take programming courses, but that wasn't much comfort to first year students who just wanted to pass the introductory class they were already in.

And if what you said is true, that later courses are built on the assumption that one understands the function and usefulness of pointers despite the poor explanations, then its no wonder so many people bounce off of computer science at such a low level.

I definitely feel this. I had to take a programing course in university and I was easily able to follow along up until the lesson on pointers, whereupon I completely lost the thread and never recovered.

I've known a good number of computer scientists over the years, and the general consensus I got from them is that my story is neither unique nor uncommon.

You have yet to satisfactorily establish that. The most you've mustered is claiming that Jehovah would have known his victims were guilty and so was was justified in killing them. This excuse only works if one starts from a position of, "Jehovah is good", and then finds justification for his actions afterwards. In every other instance we would judge people by their actions, yet you want to make a special exception for your god where we reverse the calculus and judge his actions by his person instead.

I reject this backwards logic, and still conclude that the god of the Old Testament is a vindictive, bloodthirsty character, much more in line with his Iron Age contemporaries than with any modern conception of a god. This is one of the fundamental flaws of Christianity: that its god cannot be separated from its narrow, barbaric past, and thus cannot be easily squared with what is expected of a universal deity.

I do not care how local you think the myth of Noah's Flood was supposed to be, as that fact is immaterial to the point you continue to miss. That flood still would have killed innocent people, and the story frames this as a morally just action. No amount of quibbling over linguistics will change that.

The amount of excuses needed to ignore the plain implications of a passage is really telling. One could take the Old Testament as it appears: a series of books written and edited (and redacted, and co-opted, and edited again) as the religious and cultural canon in the Iron Age for an otherwise obscure Levantine tribe, with morals from a different time and place unsuited to our modern sensibilities. There are many such books and traditions from all over the world that contain tales just as horrifying as any in the Old Testament, so it would not be without company.

But the apologist wants us to believe that their ancient stories are actually true, and so they have to invent all these insane reasons why clearly immoral actions by their book's main character are totally justified. This is the sort of position that can only come about when someone decides what they believe first and then looks for rationale afterwards.

You can't even keep your own stories straight. The Great Flood myth in the Bible is very explicit that all life on earth will be destroyed, except that aboard Noah's Ark. Genesis 7:23 (NIV):

"Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark."

There is no reason to believe that Noah's family were the only innocents in the Flood story. I do not know how one can pin the supposed hedonism of the world on all those young children who would have drowned.

There is also no way to excuse killing the children of thousands of people because of the actions of one man. Blaming that one man for "forcing" supposedly omnipotent being to act in that way is also unjustifiable.

And there is no way to shift blame for genocide by simply saying, "the underlings took it too far." This excuse rings especially hollow when Jehovah asks for a cut of the spoils afterward (Numbers 31:25-31).

Well, there's the Flood and the Ten Plagues (particularly that tenth one) for starters.

Then there's the various war crimes committed by the Israelites at Jehovah's explicit instructions (e.g. the genocide of the Midianites in Numbers 31).

My version of this story happened in the gymnasium. My class, along with the students from three other classes, were all formed up as a choir and had just wrapped up practicing a song for the school's Christmas play. One kid let loose, and the whole assembly made a very hasty (and disorderly) retreat, leaving the poor guy standing in a puddle of his own vomit.

No posts here? I'll be first.

I tried the demo for a few hours last night and liked a lot of what I saw. I'm a fan of Ogre Battle, and it's nice to see that Atlus can at least use that series' DNA for something, even if they won't (or can't) put out another official game.

My biggest issue is that some of the screens feel too information dense. I had to sit a metre closer to my TV in order to read some of the menus and stat pages.

The story also looks like it's going to be very generic and predictable. That's not uncommon, but it is disappointing every time it happens.

There's a few other minor issues, like the lack of a "halt" command on the tactical map, or that the mapping of the cursor to the analog stick feels a bit off in certain menus.

I'm glad another game like this is being released. Symphony of War was my favourite game of 2022 and reminded me why I like this sort of game in the first place.

I just brought my toddler to the ER, and it is apparently a 14 hour wait to see a doctor.

I can't even muster up the energy to be angry. I just feel defeated.

Part of it is the pendulum of Canadian politics. The Liberals have been in power for a long time and many people in the "great Canadian middle" have swung over to the Conservative side. That makes the prospects of another Liberal government forming in the next election slim.

But also, yes, there are some people who hate Trudeau on principle. My holidays this year were exhausting.