&gt; It&#x27;s as if you had to be there from the start to have a full image of how the language grew and truly understand the interplay between all the &quot;features&quot;, otherwise it&#x27;s too late to become an expert, and in some cases even too late to become comfortable writing good maintainable code in C++.<p>This is funny to me (not in a condescending way) because I had the exact opposite thought today. I actually came back to C++ on my own fairly recently after learning about the modern version of the language. I was lamenting about how lucky I was to have started learning with C++14 because I didn&#x27;t have to go through the horrible C++98 and C++03 eras. In fact I could simply ignore most of it.<p><i>It&#x27;s all about diving straight into the modern stuff.</i> The biggest problem with learning C++ is that most textbooks, classes, university courses don&#x27;t actually teach you the real C++ parts until the last 4 weeks of the courses. Instead they teach you &quot;C with classes.. and std::cout&quot;.
This has been acknowledged as an problem by some of the more prominent members of the committee.<p>I urge you to watch Kate Gregory&#x27;s talk from cppcon 2015 &quot;Stop Teaching C&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk</a><p>Not only is she a great presenter, but she makes amazing points about what is fundamentally wrong with how C++ is taught in classrooms around the globe. I really hope her talk makes some impact. I know I used to hate the language. That was when I was writing it for my university that for some reason didn&#x27;t want to upgrade their 2007 gcc compiler. The C++ programming I learned from that course was so outdated that I literally cringe looking back. It&#x27;s totally pointless to teach C++ that only compiles on legacy compilers. CS education can be so backwards sometimes. We have C++14 on every major compiler, people!<p>Either way, I&#x27;m not optimistic the language will ever be popular on this website. From what I&#x27;ve observed, every C++ topic, project, or observation is used as an excuse to bash the language and talk about Rust.