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When I first learned C++ 6-7 years ago, what I learned was basically "C with Classes". std::vector was definitely an advanced topic, something you could learn about if you really wanted to. And there was certainly no one telling me that destructors could be harnessed to help manage memory. Today, everywhere I look I see RAII and SFINAE and STL and Boost and, well, Modern C++. Even people who are just getting started with the language seem to be taught these concepts almost from day 1.

My question is, is this simply because I'm only seeing the "best", that is, the questions here on SO, and on other programming sites that tend to attract beginners (gamedev.net), or is this actually representative of the C++ community as a whole?

Is modern C++ really becoming the default? Rather than being some fancy thing the experts write about, is it becoming "the way C++ just is"? Or am I just unable to see the thousands of people who still learn "C with classes" and write their own dynamic arrays instead of using std::vector , and do memory management by manually calling new/delete from their top-level code?

As much as I want to believe it, it seems incredible if the C++ community as a whole has evolved so much in basically a few years. What are your experiences and impressions?

(disclaimer: Someone not familiar with C++ might misinterpret the title as asking whether C++ is gaining popularity versus other languages. That's not my question. "Modern C++" is a common name for a dialect or programming style within C++, named after the book "Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied", and I'm solely interested in this versus "old C++". So no need to tell me that C++'s time is past, and we should all use Python ;))