The programming community consists of two opposing group. The first one are old school programmer who have learned programming in the 1980. This group is familiar with Assembly language, C and sometimes the C++ language is used for creating modern desktop applications. This approach to writing software can be called a professional one because it garantees the maximum performance and is used to create large scale productive programs.
On the other hand, there are programmers who are not calling themself developers because they have never learnt to write code in C or Assembly language. The difference between both groups can be made visible by the different understanding of a pointer. Only the real programmers can explain what a pointer is, and they have used them all the time. Pointers are used for creating faster games and handle lot of data in a program.
The interesting situation is, that it is not possible to learn C/C++ or assembly without understanding pointers. They are a fundamental part of these language. To write anyhow a program a different sort of programming language is used. Typical examples for recent programming languages are groovy, python, matlab, javascript and Autoit. What these languages have in common the user has to enter only a little amount of code, and the written code reads easier.
A typical example is to compare a swing gui written in java, with a GTK+ gui written in C. The c code needs 4x more lines of code, and ofcourse the pointer operator * is used everwhere. In contrast, Groovy and especially python are much easier to read.
There is a reason why the scripting languages haven't replace real programming languages. Because a scripting language is using a lot overhead to reach the same goal. They are not a minimalist language like Assembly, but before groovy can be executed lots of programs have to installed first. And all of the underlying programs like operating systems, Virtual machines are written not in groovy but in powerful languages like C, C++ and Java.