...without burdening the programmer with the manual management of memory allocation and pointers...
that's all nice and good for your web programmers, but when you have 80MB of ram available, in two different areas with different performance on each you are very happy to be able to do your own memory allocation. all these talks about "high level" language assume that everybody is only programming applications that do not need to worry about memory issues. but try to program an operating system or a video game without "worrying" about it, and we'll see where you go. the day they give these languages the same flexibility that C++ provides I will stop using it. until then, C++ is king, and scripting languages are useful, well... for scripting
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss