I have followed an academic path so far, so none to little formal training and lots of room to try out my own ideas. Often ten lines of Python can already be a

I have followed an academic path so far, so none to little formal training and lots of room to try out my own ideas. Often ten lines of Python can already be a significant improvement over using some convoluted 'easy-to-use' GUI tool (looking at you, Origin...). I started exactly like this, and the pattern I wanted to use/learn was 'classes'. After struggling for a while, I realized that what I wanted to do was much easier to solve with a 'table' (list of lists) and creating functions that return the resulting table modified. It taught me that there is value in simplicity, in particular at the level you understand right now, or are at least not too far outside of your knowledge-zone. If you want to get things done, that is ;) Note that this was a few years before scientific Python and its ecosystem came into full-swing, I'd probably have discovered and uses Pandas right now. Later I learned that this was called functional programming, I learned how classes work and what they are useful for (far larger programs than I was writing at the start of my career). C++ is a fixture in the scientific community (I'm now into Monte Carlo and solvers), and while I'm happy C++11 happened, the functionality of the C++ stdlib enables so many different styles that it is really hard to get a team to stick to a subset, and not get too distracted with all the nice new tools. Sure, much of it is nice, but how we can write C++20 is pretty much another language from C++03. I guess I rambled a bit there. What I'm saying is that I'm generally critical of using new features, unless I've seen a convincing and for me personally concrete demonstration of how it saves mental CPU-cycles or boiler plate. This makes it easy for me (in the end, I'm not here for the code but for what you can do with it) and onboarding others (who, in science, might barely know that C++ has versions). KISS KISS KISS. Nothing will convince me of the opposite :)