Programming languages making new revisions is better than the absence of revisions.
> All of this would be different if you could just compile this stuff to a binary format
Hardly. C99/11, C++98/03/11/14/17/2a -- these changes modify syntactical language features available during compilation and target libs. This article is from 2012 but its author appears to come to this conclusion as of yesterday [1]. Unfortunately, instead of embracing the change that takes place in both Python and C/C++, she seems to reject it all due to the complexity introduced.
Indeed, some folks tend to embrace portability over all else. CPython itself only started to move beyond requiring C89 within the last couple of years, and they're selective on which C99 features they're willing to leverage. It's an extraordinarily portable project, IMO. OTOH there are projects who leverage more modern language features in C or C++. Those projects sacrifice portability, often to move the complexity of some of their design elements into the compiler and/or platform libraries. I believe that the latter is a better option, when it's available.