[gte910h]

1> C++ is a bad example, it has notoriously leaky abstractions which require a soup to nuts understanding to effectively use it in a professional setting.

>What’s the fun of letting someone do all the work for you?

2> Getting onto another task. The levels of abstraction in today's toolkits give you 10-100x the functionality for the same effort 12 years ago for many things (including modern C++ libraries).

3> Embedded programmers most definitely are still getting into hardware constraints. Good iPhone and Android devs worry about power and memory all the time as well as performance differences in multiple versions of devices as well as when memory gets scarce. Embedded Linux developers worry about total system memory footprints/lifecycles and boot/update cycles, etc.