I had the problem of worrying about low-level nuts and bolts for a while too; I guess it must have been the jarring difference in expressiveness between C++ and Lisp that made me stop worrying in the end. I don't think you can realistically wean yourself from C++'s mind pollution gradually - you have to go cold turkey and go with a high level language, dynamic typing, garbage collection, not especially object oriented, etc. Do a couple of smaller projects with a language like that and you'll probably find that you don't really want that "better C++" of yours after all.