unless you are on a standards committee or are writing a compiler... Or you work on an existing codebase. Most C++ code that I worked on had templates, excepti

unless you are on a standards committee or are writing a compiler... Or you work on an existing codebase. Most C++ code that I worked on had templates, exceptions, and used the C preprocessor. I used to have your attitude. This works for many languages, e.g. if you know some of the syntax of Python or Go and the usual stuff from the standard library, you can get pretty far. If you want to write modern C++, this is not really true. You need to know about const correctness, lifetimes, some templates, etc. Or you cannot deal with most projects or libraries, like Boost, Eigen, etc. It's like saying you can program Haskell in 2014 without knowing typeclasses, lenses, GADTs, etc. You can write some educational form of Haskell, sure. But many libraries use these.