The "tons of knowledge" are "just" the STL. It is a template library and thus needs knowledge of the concept of templating. So that's quite some knowledge requ

The "tons of knowledge" are "just" the STL. It is a template library and thus needs knowledge of the concept of templating. So that's quite some knowledge required compared to list usage in Python, which doesn't require a single include line. Of course, the situation is basically the same if you replace C++ by Java. Or Python by Ruby.