In my experience, C++ is really a double-edged sword in this regard. At its best, it provides tools for building cost-free abstractions that hide bit-twiddling

In my experience, C++ is really a double-edged sword in this regard. At its best, it provides tools for building cost-free abstractions that hide bit-twiddling and assembly hacks while providing an expressive set of building blocks for the semantic layers above them. In this case a programmer only thinks about one layer at a time, so the mapping and messaging can be tuned to their domain, but the implementation is abstracted. At its worst, it provides the verbosity of Enterprise Java with the memory safety of C and it becomes very difficult to trace what the program is doing and how. I have found this is very strongly related to the widespread use of non-smart pointers. This lets the semantic domains smear into each other and tends to produce astonishingly brittle code.