There are numerous ways in which this tradeoff plays out. For example, most embedded code is written in C, which doesn't hold your hand and pretty much requires you to do everything yourself. More modern languages like C++ and Java offer considerable assets to the programmer in terms of handling automatically things which a C programmer would have to do directly. On the other hand, you have to load a much bigger runtime system (consuming memory) and a lot of the code generated by the language runs less efficiently than would comparable C-code (decreasing execution speed). A competent C++ programmer could probably finish his program sooner and it would usually have far fewer bugs, though, and if the hardware can sustain the lowered efficiency of the code, it's still probably the right thing to do.