Tonight I am tackling paying down some tech debt with my sloppy (and very rushed) coding I did a few weeks ago.
I need to flesh out my Linux utils for Creatures. I need a stress-test util that'll let me send random frames over and over again so I can make sure things aren't drifting!
I can't believe I found pointers scary for so long! Now that I know what they actually are, and how they work, I think they're pretty easy.
I spent like 20 years being scared of pointers! I feel so silly.
All it took was me finding a passion project that I'm writing in C for microcontroller (and Linux PC) use. I've been at this about a year and my C skills are better than they've ever been!
(And YES I know about Rust. The Pico SDK is in C!)
@opsnlops Hah. Yes. I first had to learn to use pointers when programming in PL/I in 1973. Looking back on it, I'm surprised it took me so long to "get it", given that I was already an inveterate machine language programmer.
Despite programming for five years, what I lacked was a good understanding of how useful they are and the fast-executing structures you can make using them. A bit more learning and I became a huge fan, which then influenced my machine language programming.
These days I'm learning golang and am feeling a bit hemmed in by the lack of pointers. On the other hand, I understand the need for safe programming languages, which will surely become mandated as time goes on. Pointers are powerful and fast, but dangerous unless you know what you're doing.
@shuttersparks I work for a golang shop. It's a nice language, even if I feel hamstrung at times.
I thought about using it for this project (TinyGO is a thing, and there's gobot.io), but I didn't want to make things even harder on myself. I have enough to learn. :)
@opsnlops Yes, I like it. It took me a while to get my head around the mindset behind the language. It looks like C, but it's really different.
Now I have the right attitude about anything new. "What weird way does golang do this?" That's not a criticism because there are good reasons for why. You just have to learn what they are.
I'm still nervous about the lack of pointers, though. There are so many cool tricks I know that use pointers, I'll have to learn new tricks. Sigh.
