Physical computing sounds like an incredibly limiting environment, like using FrontPage rather than HTML, CSS and JavaScript. How do you do anything abstract on

Physical computing sounds like an incredibly limiting environment, like using FrontPage rather than HTML, CSS and JavaScript. How do you do anything abstract on a platform like this? How do you i integrate any two arbitrary pieces of software? How do you apply basic programming practices such as functional (as opposed to copy/paste) reuse? Or do you end up modifying code the 95% of the time the abstraction hinders rather than helps? I really hope this isn't how we teach programming to the next generation, because it will severely limit their understanding of what makes programming great.