| It's nice to hear this kind of concerns; don't be afraid! At last, C++ committee members are just people like you, hopefully nicer than expectation. > I find reading C++ "standards" papers onerous and feel like they're written in a way that's deliberately inaccessible. Sadly, it's somehow true; standard wordings are typically not readable for laypeople because its primary purpose is unambiguous specification but not education. Generally, I find that it's a good idea to avoid "wording for ~~" proposals if I haven't followed that specific line of proposals from its beginning. But many proposals are still fairly readable technical papers; for instance, Herb Sutter's proposals are generally easy to follow. (ex. https://wg21.link/P0709) > I feel like I'd be marginalized for not using template metaprogramming, not knowing the new hotness by heart, and generally being a proponent of C-with-classes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc Don't worry. Mike Acton is not known to be a strong proponent of "Modern C++", but his session[1] is one of the most popular CppCon video on Youtube. Even if you don't like templates, people will generally respect you. > I just feel like so much of the C++ "standards" work feels like it's led by academics who think the concerns of working programmers like me are beneath them. http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/n479... You can find the list of the participants for the last meeting. Most of them are just engineers and even Bjarne is now working for Morgan Stanley (I think most of "designed by Ivory Tower" concerns can be generally credited to Bjarne being a professor before) They're just writing C++ code as their daily job like you (and very likely suffering from C++ as well). That's why they're writing proposals to improve the language. Some tangential story: except for few exceptions, PL academics are generally not working on languages like C++ because it typically doesn't align well with their interests. Usually they tend to use more elegant, academic friendly languages like Haskell or ML. Or even fancier languages like Coq, Adga, Idris, depending on topics. Or design their own languages. For formal verification researches, maybe C or Java. But C++ is typically considered as a complex, inelegant beast for researches. |