It's pretty obvious things have moved on massively since the 80s.

You're trying to make an (extremely weak) reductio ad absurdum argument, an intellectually bankrupt solipsist.

There's no point engaging you with anything more than exasperation, especially since the guy's asking for help, not useless snark.

Actually, to be completely honest, because you've made me angry now, only an asshole would say something like that to someone asking for help.

> It's pretty obvious things have moved on massively since the 80s.

Not that obvious for me. I cannot see any significant changes. Mind giving some examples?

> especially since the guy's asking for help

He's asking for motivation, not for help. And it should be good to know that he do not need to learn much, everything is pretty much the same as it used to be, just presented slightly differently. New terminology can be learned in a couple of days.

And this is the false perception that things have changed and there is a lot to learn that made the OP feel powerless. You're not helping him by reiterating the bullshit that have scared him in the first place.

People look at e.g. Node.js and think it's a "new" "technology" or even in some cases "platform". In reality it's a well-known Reactor Pattern with some package management running on a not-very-slow virtual machine using exclusively a weakly typed dynamic language which takes years to update with features.

And yet a vastly more productive environment than actually trying to get the same thing done in C++.

I've worked with two commercial C++ systems designed around the reactor pattern, so perhaps not an expert, but this is not a drive-by comment either.

The C++ projects I worked on ended up requiring extra little "threads on the side" to deal with stuff like sync DB drivers or closed source libs. Little inefficiencies added up to the point where we may as well have done the darn things in JS anyway.