I gave up on C++ right after I learned it. At the time, this was before the STL was part of the standard, it looked really cool but I could tell that it was easy to get into trouble and it would take years and years to be really good at it. When Java became popular, it looked like it solved a lot of the problems that I was afraid of with C++. But it was slow and really verbose compared to C++ and C. Recently, I heard someone say that today's C++ is not your grandfather's C++ and the speaker made some interesting comments about how much better it was. So I'm intrigued by it and definitely open to looking into the new C++.