When I look at C++14 and later I can't help but throw my hands up, laugh and think who, except for a small circle of language academics, actually believes that all this new template crap syntax actually helps developers?
Personally I judge code quality by a) Functionality (does it work, is it safe?), b) Readability c) Conciseness d) Performance and e) Extendibility, in this order, and I don't see how these new features in reality help move any of these meaningfully in the right direction.
I know the intentions are good, and the argument is that "it's intended for library developers" but how much of a percentage is that vs. just regular app/backend devs? In reality what's going to happen is that inside every organization a group of developers with good intentions, a lack of experience and too much time will learn it all and then feel the urge to now "put their new knowledge to improve the codebase", which generally just puts everyone else in pain and accomplishes exactly nothing.
Meanwhile it's 2021 and C++ coders are still
- Waiting for Cross-Platform standardized SIMD vector datatypes
- Using nonstandard extensions, libraries or home-baked solutions to run computations in parallel on many cores or on different processors than the CPU
- Debugging cross-platform code using couts, cerrs and printfs
- Forced to use boost for even quite elementary operations on std::strings.
Yes, some of these things are hard to fix and require collaboration among real people and real companies. And yes, it's a lot easier to bury your head in the soft academic sand and come up with some new interesting toy feature. It's like the committee has given up.
Started coding C++ when I was 14 -- 22 years ago.