Herb Sutter - The future of Visual C++, Part I

I rode an old war-horse called assembly language through the bulk of my programming career.  I also dabbled in Fortran, APL, COBOL, even did some Algol and Snobol.  So it's nice to hear something positive said about the value of getting closer to the iron as the trend has been to abstract the iron away.  I get a charge out of C# because it makes doing simple things simple and increases my productivity.  And I don't have to create for the 100th time some variation on a collection class.  I had a conversation last summer with one of my contemporaries during which I remarked that today's Computer Science student may not be getting fully exposed to core concepts like trees, queues, hash tables, dequeues, stacks, spin locks and so forth because these are abstracted away as prewritten classes.  Not that that's bad in general.  It's not.  But it poses a problem for teachers of computer science who must ensure the way these things work under the hood are revealed.  Of course, this piece is about C++ which I used for many years as a systems programming language.  When I first read the C++ for .NET book, I was frankly appalled at how different the language I had grown so familiar with looked.  That's when I learned C#.  I don't denigrate C++ and I am happy to learn problems with using C++ in a managed code environment are being addressed.  For me, though, I use C++ only when C# does not fulfill my needs.