I think he was talking about pointer from the "idea" point of view, not the language feature. References in high level languages are mostly hidden pointers. A

I think he was talking about pointer from the "idea" point of view, not the language feature. References in high level languages are mostly hidden pointers. A good knowledge of how pointers work is really important to get a good understanding of how high level languages work (a lot of Java programmers don't well understand the distinction between value and reference types, for instance). Likely, be at ease with recursion is also very important as many complex problems are recursive by nature, and so way easier to solve using functional techniques.