>... what he thinks of modern C++ where the learning curve for newbies is now getting close to vertical. Speaking as a C++ dev of 25 years I wouldn't go near the language now if I was starting out, the number of paradigms and syntactic complexity has become ridiculous. And yes, if you're going to work on code written by others you do need to know and understand all these paradigms.
C++ is the easiest to learn now in, like, ever.
It's a mistake you have to know all the ins and outs of the language. The minimal set you need to do interesting things is quite small and it is much more usable than ever. I haven't had a memory leak or other memory issue since I switched over to modern C++ 10+ years ago.
Well, I had one once, but I did it deliberately to see if my tools (ASAN) would detect it. It did.