I don't think he is saying pointers et al. aren't important. Consider the Whitehead quote: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operatio

I don't think he is saying pointers et al. aren't important. Consider the Whitehead quote: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." Even so, I imagine that most garbage collection proponents still think people should learn about pointers and GC, just not use them (unless there is a good reason to).