To be clear I'm using "accidental complexity" in the sense of Brooks. He breaks complexity in software systems, in his No Silver Bullet paper, into two categories: accidental and essential. My contention is that for most programers and programs pointers fall under the category of accidental complexity. That does not diminish their utility, nor mean that they never fall under the category of essential complexity (indeed, having spent most of my career on embedded systems, there are things we could not have done or done as easily without pointers). Just that, for most of the things people want to accomplish when programming a computer, pointers (though often not the broader sense of references) are accidental (i.e. unnecessary) complexity.