[maranas]

^ Ditto. I thought pointers were being shown in a negative light at first, but now I see the point. In my opinion too, manual memory management is a very important part of developing highly scalable applications, but should only be done if absolutely needed - which is fortunately rarely the case nowadays as most people just develop for the Web, and can afford to throw money at the problem. But for embedded systems where resources are limited and inputs are very limited, it is still very useful. In the early years, it was C + inline assembly for further optimization - where you try your best to avoid assembly. I guess now, it's a dynamic/interpreted language, plus C/C++ for further optimization, and avoid C/C++ like the plague as much as possible.