Comment by nickelpro

> even senior C++ developers are always going to be able to deduce the correct value category

Depends what "senior" means in this context. Someone with 20-years of domain experience in utility billing, who happened to be writing C++ for those 20 years? Probably not.

Someone who has been studying and teaching C++ for 20 years? Yes they are able to tell you the value category at a glance.

Language experience is not something you develop accidentally, you don't slip into just because you're using the language. Such tacit experience quickly plateaus. If you make the language itself the object of study, you will quickly surpass "mere" practitioners.

This is true of most popular programming languages in my experience. I find very, very few Python programmers understand the language at an implementation level, can explain the iterator protocol or what `@coroutine` actually used to do, how `__slots__` works, etc.

C++ is not unique in this, although it is old and has had a lot more time to develop strange corners.