OK, then we will call them driver writers and they will do exactly the same stuff. An embedded application that doesn't do something fairly unique with the hard

OK, then we will call them driver writers and they will do exactly the same stuff. An embedded application that doesn't do something fairly unique with the hardware isn't an embedded application. It's just a regular computer application. That's why we make the distinction. Low resource systems won't be going away any time soon either. The ignition (or battery controller) in something like a weed whacker is unlikely to be communicating with anything and will likely be running on a 8 bit processor with no room for libraries. I don't see that the problem is that we will lose the skillset as suggested in the article. The bigger problem is that we have trouble producing embedded programmers in the first place. The universities/colleges are doing a terrible job. Most embedded programmers picked it up on their own by messing around.