No, I don't.
> Pointers, references, whatever you call them.
References are not pointers, and I stand by what I said. Pointers are not needed by most people writing software outside of very specific domains.
References are a related but distinct concept. I can "hold a reference" to something without ever being able to read what its memory address is or change what memory address that reference points to. The power to do that is unnecessary for most programs that are written.
> They exist for a reason.
Did I ever say otherwise?
EDIT: Expanding on the notion of "need". A programmer using a C library "needs" pointers because the C library almost certainly makes use of them. The user may or may not need to use pointers themselves to interact with the library (that is, it may offer an interface based on values and not pointers). A programmer on any OS I can think of will be making use of pointers through similar levels of indirection. As an Erlang hobbyist, the implementation almost certainly uses pointers internally, but as an Erlang programmer I wouldn't use them directly. In order to write a program in Erlang, I never need a pointer, though I may make use of some kind of reference (process IDs are a kind of references, but they are not pointers).