> Are you asking about the ROI in terms of professional career opportunities? Probably three orders of magnitude greater than it is for Rust, D, Haskell, Lisp

> Are you asking about the ROI in terms of professional career opportunities? Probably three orders of magnitude greater than it is for Rust, D, Haskell, Lisp If you're asking me to be specific, then I'd like to compare the ROI of developing greater C++ intuition vs. developing better machine learning intuition. > If you've ridden a bike with training wheels your whole life, then aren't you at least curious at some point to see what it's like with them taken off? Like just about everyone here, I've spent years of my life writing C in systems and OS classes. Are the OO abstractions that Cpp layers on top of C really that important for my personal growth? I don't see it unless I have something practical I can use it for. > If nothing else, then you'll learn why decisions were made the way they were in derivative languages, and become a better programmer overall. It gives you certain amount of confidence to have experience in a language that most people are afraid of. This is the definition of hand-wavy, and sounds a lot like the reasons the people on HN give for learning functional languages like Lisp and Haskell that you deride so much.