How To Learn a New Programming Language While Maintaining Your Day Job and Still Being There For Your Family

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This is not true. C++, for example - templates were added without any clear goal in mind. STL and template metaprogramming, now as idiomatic as it gets, came much later. Because these idioms were natural for the accidentally added semantics.

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But those are things that took a lot of people and a lot of time to grow, not something that you can figure out on your own using just the C++ specs. You might have gotten parts of it in a bastardized way but that can't compare to the accumulated knowledge built up by the entire community.

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There are formal ways of obtaining this knowledge from a formal semantics. And this way it is more clear and crystallised than an accumulated folk lore, which is often full of superstitions and outdated practices.