Pointers are absolutely part of the average Haskell and Python work environment -- it's impossible to get reasonable performance without them. Of course, Python programmers like to stick the important parts in an extension module (written in C, naturally), close their eyes, and pretend they're not doing anything "unsafe".<p>&#62; It's not even like Haskell makes it trivial to mutate the pointers in a natively Von Neumann-esque manner.<p>Haskell has a module specifically for manipulating pointers[1]. There's no inherent safety in using Haskell rather than C for pointer based code.<p>&#62; Monads don't count either.<p>This sentence makes <i>no sense</i>, and makes me think you've never (or seldom) used Haskell before.<p>&#62; Example: how often have you seen unsafe C# code (pointers) used in a production web app?<p>Somewhat often -- pointers are used in database adapter, template engines, graphics rendering, and any code which needs to call into foreign libraries.<p>&#62; Counterpart to the above: How often do you see pointers used in C? All the time<p>That's because C is used in code where performance is absolutely critical, which demands having control over memory layout and management. Pointers aren't a symptom of using C -- using C is a result of needing pointers.<p>[1] <a href="http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base-4.2.0.0/Foreign-Ptr.html" rel="nofollow">http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base-4.2.0...</a>