He is one of those developers whose skills are in such demand that employers tend to give him what he asks for. For the past nine months, Aitken has been using Java to build graphical interfaces for business systems. More than most developers, he knows what kind of magic Java can work. And I can download dynamic behavior that will allow images to move around an interface. Those are the only technological things Java is capable of doing.
Pointers are an efficient means of passing information without having to pass all of it at once.
You pass the address and receivers use it to get what they really want. For everyone else, pointers are extremely difficult as a concept. Java has removed those, and that means that everybody, not just the average Joes, but the gurus as well, has to deal with this simpler paradigm. Still, when programmers begin to exploit Java's full potential, the code they write will be far from simple, according to Aitken. If you don't understand that, you're going to be writing programs that are just as crummy with Java as they are with anything else.