Funny, after I moved from programming assembly to mostly C (on microcontrollers) I thought pointers and memory allocation were the neatest things. I guess it all depends on your perspective, write a few thousand lines of assembly on a chip with 256 bytes of ram and pointers seem quite magical.

I also think Jeff doesn't realize just how many people out there still write code for small 8 and 16 bit processors, much of which is in C. Although I would not really recommend using malloc in most of those cases the "dangerous concepts of pointers" are still very alive and well.