Namespaces - what do they solve? I don't think you'll have so many functions that you run out of letter combinations for a function.
Garbage collection - Yikes... never heard of freeing memory? When you allocate memory for an object, structure or buffer, why not free that memory when you don't use it anymore? It's as simple as that. Garbage collection is an "alibi" to do careless programming.
Const keyword - the most useless thing on earth. If I want a value not to be changed, why not use macros? And who would be that stupid to accidentally modify a variable which is not supposed to be modified.
Most of the stuff you mentioned doesn't give any real advantages. They just teach us bad habits like always giving the functions the same names in libraries, not freeing memory, making stupid mistakes etc.
What's ruining the art of programming is that people are taught to do what would otherwise be mistakes and software has to hunt&kill them. Why not write good code? Nowadays most performance goes to runtime environments or CRT checking if you have made stupid mistakes. Why not spend performance for the reason that the application was designed for?
When disassembling some programs programmed in high-level languages, I can clearly see that the code that the application actually was meant to do makes a small portion of the code that runs for every function. Visual Basic even adds "jo xxxxx" (if calculation overflow, then jump to exception handler, it triggers when doing unsigned INT_MAX+1, which results in 0) after almost every other assembly instruction. And MSVC++ compiled executables call a complex checking in the beginning and in the end of every function, not mentioning that it calls the checker many-many more times during the function depending on what it does.
Anyone care to do MD5 benchmarking for example in C# and then compare it with C and Assembly? You'll be surprised.