I'm the missfit here! My background in analog IC design and physics rather than software. But some of the issues discussed here are close to the transistor level implementation of a chip. (For instance a headder file is nothing else than a list of addresses of the on chip registers).

I use programming to evaluate and filter data dumped from my test equipment to the disk. Most of it is pure C-code, Perl, Python, Octave, No whistles, no bells! naked data processing (command line. I'm not willing to spend effort on GUIs for software noone else uses).

Besides that I work with the usual electronics stuff: SPICE, SPECTRE, fasthenry, verilog, gnuplot..