> Are you talking about C++ or high level languages in general? c++ specifically. if I don't care about the difference between, for example, a list, a vector,

> Are you talking about C++ or high level languages in general? c++ specifically. if I don't care about the difference between, for example, a list, a vector, and a deque, I am probably going to choose a higher level language to work in. that said, you can write container agnostic code with templates and range-based for and/or iterators if you really want. I agree with your other points. in particular, it's annoying to have to reach for libcurl every time I want to do simple http stuff, and I have fond memories of scheme from cs 101, as beautiful and unpractical as it is.