I'll answer from the perspective of someone who uses C++ for work and for some personal projects. The answer is: Effectively not hard, because: 1. When you wr

I'll answer from the perspective of someone who uses C++ for work and for some personal projects. The answer is: Effectively not hard, because: 1. When you write complicated software - especially with older-standard-version C++ - you often have the thought of "Oh, if I could only do X more easily" or "wouldn't it be good if we could skip the tedious coding to make the compiler do Y?" - and then you either grit your teeth and write something ugly which works. But then, a few years later, you hear it mentioned that X' or Y' have been standardized, and then you know "Oh, good, now I can do that more easily". 2. Stuff that you _don't_ know about, that gets introduced - you typically don't have to know about. Either it's not relevant to you, or it is, but you're just writing old-style code. 3. The "junk" gradually makes you be able to write the code you want more easily. So, unless you want to do deep guru things - you can gradually even _forget_ things you used to know how to do, since you no longer need to know about them.