> A CS student developing novel learning-based image processing methods has no need for knowledge of obscure gdb commands and C++'s pointer and dependency voodoo.

I guess you could argue that AlexNet was the product of one very motivated CS student who was very proefficient with C++ and CUDA. This particular skill set had a very deep impact on the computer vision community. Today, how ever, you don't need it because all that has been abstracted away. But someone had to lead the way.