Fair enough, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that pointers are going away. Sure, for higher level stuff I don't want to mess with manual memory mana

Fair enough, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that pointers are going away. Sure, for higher level stuff I don't want to mess with manual memory management, but what about the massive mountain of software that all of these high level programs rely upon? We are always going to need this stuff for certain tasks. For example, I'd love to see a simply 3x3 filter operation on an image without using indices. I am also a bit biased; I'm a systems programmer, I don't write UI's and web apps. I tend to work more in the trenches, where abstraction gets in your way almost as often as it helps you get things done more quickly.