Comment by astrobe_
6 months ago
You don't have to "keep up with it", if by this you mean what I think you mean.
You don't have to use features. Instead, when you have a (language) problem to solve or something you'd like to have, you look into the features of the language.
Knowing they exist beforehand is better but is the hard part, because "deep" C++ is so hermetic that it is difficult to understand a feature when you have no idea which problem it is trying to solve.
Wrong. Most programmers spend tremendous amounts of time reading and maintaining someone else's code. You absolutely have to keep up with it.
Thankfully "most" C++ code was written before C++11 (good luck with programs that fully utilize "modern" C++'s constructs and their semantics, because at this point only compilers can reliably manipulate them).