
Most of us that work in the IT industry have been around for a long time. We started out in our parents basement writing code in some BASIC environment, ussually Commodore BASIC or QBASIC. Do you remember how thrilling it was? Your first program and it was something extremely basic but the point was it worked. Some of us got hooked right away and kept trying to solve problems and added more and more pushing the capabilities of whatever language we used. As we got older the environments progressed and the programming tools progressed and got more complicated.
@JeffS
Yes and No. Even with STL, string manipulation is still a mess, and simple methods like ToUpper, ToLower are still missing. Frankly, can you say that:
transform (MyString.begin(),MyString.end(), MyString.begin(), tolower);
is elegant, when with other languages or libraries, MyString.ToLower() and the job is done ??
And I don't speak about unicode.
STL are not for hobbists, it is just for unix gurus.