Where in this article does the author explain why C and C++ are awful? He only gives one or two examples. The main argument seems to be that Scheme is easier to teach but I don't see how that makes C or C++ bad programming languages. I agree that C++ a horrible mess, but C is not...and it's not hard to learn either (in fact, it was the language I learned programming with). I do agree that Scheme is a very nice language, but that doesn't make every other language out there bad.

Also I don't agree with the notion that programming is all about high level algorithms and abstraction. In the end you're programming a physical computer and you should be aware of that. In some (or even many) cases Scheme or Python or whatever (even C perhaps) may be too abstract for what you're doing, so use what's appropriate.