Ah; a kindred "old fogey" :-) Yes our experience shapes how eager we are to jump to learn new things. But it is eventually done at our own pace. In general though, with age and experience people become more cautious psychologically. Probably because we have made so many mistakes which in hindsight could have been avoided if we had thought more and studied more. This is what is frustrating with "shiny new" features. Even before people have gotten some substantial real-world experience with C++11, you have C++14/17/20/23 piling on top and making us feel peak "imposter syndrome". To make matters worse, the noobs/wannabes start "cargo cult programming" with no real understanding and thus ruining the s/n ratio. They don't understand that merely learning the new syntactical features will not magically make one a better and more productive programmer.

The C++ standards committee really needs to disband itself for a decade and leave us programmers in peace :-) Stroustrup wasn't kidding when in the preface to the 4th edition of TC++PL he said "C++11 feels like a new language".

Finally, i agree that we need to be aware and keep abreast of new languages/features which are genuinely good/useful but i would rather be "slow and sure" than "fast and fail".

> C++ standards committee

Is working on things that would be useful. The early adopters of modules have reported some very intriguing results - it isn't ready for me to try yet, but so far what the standard committee has done looks like it will be a win for me in 5 more years when I finally can adopt it. Reflection and contracts are two other things coming that have some intriguing uses in the real world and I'm hopeful to see how/if they work out.

Agree with you on Reflections and Contracts (have actual fundamental value) but not so much on Modules (more incremental and restructuring).

If - as some have reported - modules can bring my compile time down significantly that is bigger than anything else and it will be worth the effort to adopt. That is a big if - modules are still in the early adopter stage and so we are still learning how they work. In general my project is late adopters.

> In general my project is late adopters.

Amen ;-)

John Lakos' old Large Scale C++ Software Design (there is a newer edition which i have not read) taught me C++ "physical design".