This is the part of learning to program that I suck at

I’m at Wayward with the Wif. She’s studying her nursing (oncology right now) and in reading about the joy of C++, and here comes pointers. I understand the advantage of pointers versus not pointers. I just don’t understand why not design the language to handle not pointers. The only reason pointers are necessary, as far as I can tell, is that functions can’t handle more than one return value. It’s like saying the shoe is the best hammer ever, because we don’t allow people to use hangers in this town.