You will learn to live without overloading and exceptions. Generics is an absolutely must have. In 1997 I was was giving up on C++ when I discovered the stand

You will learn to live without overloading and exceptions. Generics is an absolutely must have. In 1997 I was was giving up on C++ when I discovered the standard template library. I was lucky to be using Visual C++ on Microsoft. The (only) good thing good thing about that compiler is it implemented the STL using Stepinov's reference. Stepanov defined STL in 1994. By 1997 there were SFA implementations that followed the standard. Most "improved" it and made a mess of it, like GCC. (I may have remembered that wrong, mēh) It completely changed the way I thought about computer programming. Before that I was always programming in a style suited to assembly programming