The thing I love about Python is that it has no fricking pointers!!!
I hate pointers and getting a language that doesn't use them
win-win for me!

Welcome to the GIL then.

You're weak! Choosing a wimp language over pointers

You'll love ruby then.

You WILL use pointers if you ever choose to write a module.

Pointers are not really that hard. Its an address. That is all.

Python uses pointers all the time. Every variable is a pointer.

Every python variable that's not plain old data is a reference, so internally it's a pointer with some GC and runtime metadata. What it doesn't have is explicit raw pointers.

Pointers are just variables with addresses as their value.

You can use "pointers" with CPython. You can use the id() method with modules like ctypes.string_at(). But if you ever actually do it your coworkers will kill you.

I don't understand why people dislike "pointers". You can dislike manual memory management, or the notion of references (although that's pretty hard to avoid) or some other aspect, but pointers are present in every mainstream programming language, just under a different name and more automated.
Unless you hate the word for some reason.

I know its not like python doesn't have pointers but the fact that you don't have to worry about that makes me feel good

@homo-lorens I don't dislike them its just so confusing to me
I would just try by adding or removing the *

@eideon Don't you have compiler errors that show both types for that?