> It'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 "features", oth

> It'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 "features", otherwise it's too late to become an expert, and in some cases even too late to become comfortable writing good maintainable code in C++. Although this is perhaps a poor anecdote more than anything, I myself only learned C++ six years ago (when I was learning to program, to boot). Overall the switch to using C++ today is more of an "unlearning" process, and requires that you don't treat the language as you would treat C (for better and or worse). Overall I don't think it's true that you had to be there from the start, as you could easily just learn C++11 and C++14 style idioms today and avoid the hairier parts of the language if you want to. Reading through Scott Meyers' books are a great start, but overall I found that switching to a more modern style was very easy if you already know some basic concepts from other languages (range-based for, what a lambda is, how auto / type-inference works). I guess really, is that I think giving up because C++ has evolved very differently from C or how other languages evolve just seems... defeatist?