Um, so oil rigs are 0.2 kilometers long and have no width?

And the difference here is impact, very little actually lives IN the ice, so as long as you don't impact the surface or the base of the ice you won't be harming anyone.

Also, if somehow it exploded all we'd get are shards of ice and pools of water not gigantic oil spills...

I'm not saying you're wrong*, just that your arguments are.

*though, incidentally, you are.

Actually, I see it the other way around: you should know how the system is dealing with your data, what it does, when, how often, basically just how the computer processes. if you don't understand that then you're going to end up with unexpected results and bugs.

Learn the base first, then build on that.

ALL programming languages use variables, variables are memory pointers so learning about pointers is going to help you no matter what language you end up with.

MOST programming languages have functions and other re-usable code, the names of these are also pointers and can be handled as such (you can pass a function as the argument to another function (not just the result).

I've never met an object oriented language that didn't follow the same basic construct: data wrapped inside interfaces. I've come across two main types: c++ style and smalltalk style. Most major (widely used) OOP languages follow the c++ style. All use pointers in some way.

Without the knowledge and control of a language with pointers it's the difference between driving a car and using a keyboard to drive a computer game, you're totally disconnected.

I really don't see where the complexity lies with pointers, all named references are pointers, most of them are just automatically dereferenced. It's like a symlink for a bit of memory. If you can't understand that you probably shouldn't be programming.

Also you don't have to stick with C/C++ you just start there.

Just because it's a knee-jerk reaction doesn't mean it's wrong.

Personally I wonder why anyone would start learning real* programming with anything other than C/C++. It's the basis of the majority of the other commonly used languages out there and the majority of the rest have similar syntax and/or keywords. Sort of like learning Latin, the basis of all romance languages, except that the Roman Empire is still around so the language isn't dead.

* I'm not counting the silly qbasic stuff I played with in middle school... and no, I don't consider Visual Basic that much more advanced...