I have very little respect for the fqa. It is just a laundry list of complaints; absurd whining about every item in the C++ FAQ. For eg : http://yosefk.com/c++f

I have very little respect for the fqa. It is just a laundry list of complaints; absurd whining about every item in the C++ FAQ. For eg : http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/assign.html http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/assign.html If you are going to complain about a self assignment check in the assignment operator function, maybe you should stay away from any kind of programming at all. And I don't understand this complaining about which subset of C++ needs to be used. I have written scala code and it most definitely does not use every feature of scala. The scenarios in which any of the C++ features need to be used is fairly obvious. 1. STL - use it all the time, it is one of the core libraries of modern C++ 2. templates/overloading - You will use these features when you use STL. You typically won't create you own template classes. 3. exceptions - This is one of the C++ features used less often. Dealing with it is no different from dealing with exceptions in other languages like Java. > I find boost pleasurable to use; however looking at boost source is enough to melt my mind. The idea is that you use boost source and not look at it. boost libraries are a very specialized kind of template meta-programming code that only container writers have to deal with. I like being able to use a smart_ptr without having to worry about silly memory leaks, none of which would have been possible without templates or operator overloading in plain vanilla C. There are several deficiencies with C++, that I experience on a day to day basis, none of which are discussed in any of these online C++ rants. I have never faced any software engineering issues because of the multitude of C++ features. That has never been the problem. If anything all these features reduce the amount of boiler plate that I need to write to get my job done. You may not like STL iterators, but they are a 1000 times better than some of the gnarly C macros I have seen in C code to get STL like containers in C. Once you have seen that kind of C code, you will be glad about the existence of templates.