It seems I am becoming one of the last of the new generation of Real Programmers.
I see what you mean, but if better tools come along, why not make use of them?
The tools used are not the main point; it is mainly a question of approach to programming.
My languages of choice are (though I have recently began getting into using assembly to improve critical code where it truly matters, which it does all over the place in the case of my realtime DSP code. still a newbie when it comes to such, though) C and C++, of which the former (which the subset of C++ that I prefer using most of the time consists of) is concidered semi-obsolete, and the latter of is gradually losing popularity. The "hardcore" C users are indeed becoming the new Real Programmers. However, if someone made a better language allowing the same kind of coding as C, I wouldn't mind using it.
As languages evolve, so do the coding style, however, adding increasing amount of abstraction at the cost of efficiency. And I absolutely hate any and all kinds of useless overhead. In C, there are few restrictions to what you can do; it is a quite "unsafe" language to develop in if you don't really know what you are doing (small mistakes can often slip undetected into the code, causing problems that are hard to find if you don't know what to look for), but if you do, you can write wonderfully neat and elegant solutions that perform exceptionally well.
I don't mind using the right tool for the job, and a higher-level (more abstracted) approach can be useful in designing highly complex systems that are not performance critical, where additional abstraction serves a good purpose, as well as quickly putting together a quick-and-dirty system of some kind.
However, pretty much everything is being made using increasing levels of abstraction, even where a more direct and more efficient solution would be as manintainable by a skilled programmer.
The priority of efficiency has long since been declining. The solution to performance problems are no longer better code, but more expensive hardware. Generally, around 90% of the time the CPU spends working is wasted on producing heat; through more efficient design and optimization, you can easily bring down this percentage a fair bit. It is also not rare for programs to be over 10 times the size they need to be. The only ones interested in going far to avoid such inefficiency however, are those developing stuff that truly has to be efficient, such as DSP developers, those doing embedded programming, graphics engine programmers, etc.
phobia.