
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.
Also, the STL is not perfect, but it's there to save tons of time and make the programmer's life potentially a lot easier.
No doubt. The STL can be a phenomenally productive tool, when you use it for the right things. It's great, in particular, for scientific, mathematical, or simulation code. However, the STL isn't a completely general solution, and C++ in theory is a general-purpose language.
This poster (and others) should try QT and it's GUI design tool, QT Designer.
Qt is a great tool, but partly because it's pretty "Un-C++", with its pseudo-dynamic features. In particular, the STL zealots are always giving Qt flack for not doing things the STL way. However, it doesn't make up for deficiencies in the underlying language.
This is about as easy as it gets
Oh, it get's much easier. In particular, Kate + GCC lacks any sort of interactor, where you can type in code and have it execute on the fly. A good interactor remove the compilation step from the "edit, compile, debug" cycle, which makes it great for quicky trying out short, but tricky pieces of code. Any Python programmer will tell you that he has one Vim window open editing the code, and a python shell in another trying stuff out.