Pointers in the sense of managing memory locations are probably not critical unless the language you use presents that interface.
But "pointers" in the more general sense of having a piece of data that refers to the "real" data in another location is fundamental and appears all over. (Think foreign keys in databases, URLs, file systems, compression formats, etc.).
You really can't do anything interesting on a computer without this idea.
I'll also throw in the concept of a pointer to a pointer. Which at first seems like a silly extension; but on second look can actually allow surprising simplifications of problems.
Pointers in the sense of managing memory locations are probably not critical unless the language you use presents that interface.
But "pointers" in the more general sense of having a piece of data that refers to the "real" data in another location is fundamental and appears all over. (Think foreign keys in databases, URLs, file systems, compression formats, etc.).
You really can't do anything interesting on a computer without this idea.
I'll also throw in the concept of a pointer to a pointer. Which at first seems like a silly extension; but on second look can actually allow surprising simplifications of problems.
"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection" - David Wheeler.