[tonyarkles]

> Justifying the complexity of an interface by appeal to caste system is pretty poor, IMO.

Ahhh, I mean, isn't that a decent-sized chunk of template-based code as well? I would hazard a guess that even for a "simple" one like std::vector<foo>, there are way more C++ developers who can use std::vector than who could implement a templated vector from scratch.

I, myself, fall kind of in the zone between. I'm not a template guru, but I work on the foundational/library-type code on my team and have to do my absolute best to make sure that the stuff I build for everyone is usable without needing to know the minutia about how all that stuff works.

[nicoburns]

Yes, and that's why templates are also often criticised as a poor design.

[72deluxe]

I think many C++ devs haven't read Stroustrup's book. The intro to C++ chapter covers most of what they need to know and then the rest of the book goes into beautiful detail with examples.

Most of the C++ developers I worked with were C++ developers in name only and wrote appalling code. I was one of these developers until reading Stroustrup's book and doing my own side projects to improve skills.