>whereas many C/C++ coders naturally decompose problems in a top-down manner.

That's kind of weird, considering this quote from Ken Thompson, when asked how he thinks of such good abstractions:

"It is the way I think. I am a very bottom-up thinker. If you give me the right kind of Tinker Toys, I can imagine the building. I can sit there and see primitives and recognize their power to build structures a half mile high, if only I had just one more to make it functionally complete."