This is intriguing. Moving to garbage-collected languages is not feasible or even desirable for everyone, and software will continue to be written in C++, C, etc., for years to come. Some straightforward things being done in educational settings to try to understand the reasons we continue to encounter errors such as dereferencing dangling pointers, and low-cost (i.e., free) ways to automatically detect and prevent these problems, are described here: Adcock, B., Bucci, P., Heym, W.D., Hollingsworth, J.E., Long, T.J., and Weide, B.W., "Which Pointer Errors Do Students Make?", Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, ACM Press, March 2007, pp. 9-13, http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/rsrg/documents/2007/07ABHHLW.pdf. Mr. Allan concludes that "there will be a lot of research into dangling pointers in the future," but we should also realize that there has already been some. :-)

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