Obligatory (and hilarious) read: "The Night Watch"[0] by James Mickens. > You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw

Obligatory (and hilarious) read: "The Night Watch"[0] by James Mickens. > You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. [0]https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf