> RE: NPM, you have a right to a preference of course. I certainly don't miss the times 20 years ago when pulling in a library into a C++ project was a two-week project in itself. make and CMake work perfect right up until they don't and the last 2% cost you 98% of the time. Strategically speaking, using make/CMake is simply unjustified risk. But this is of course always written off as "skill issue!" which I gave up arguing against because the arguers apparently have never hit the dark corners. I have. I am better with Just and Cargo. And Elixir's mix / hex.

I've lost countless hours having to get the rube goldberg machine of npm, jest, typescript, ts-jest and other things to work together. In contrast when I was learning OpenGL/Vulkan and general 3d programming, I decided to bite the bullet and just do C++ from the start as that was what all the books/examples were in. I had been told by countless people how hard it all was and how terrible the build systems were. I don't agree, I think the JS ecosystem is far worse than make and CMake. Now I am already an experienced programmer that already knew C# and Java, maybe that helped as they have many of the same concepts as C++.

Now I did buy and read a book on CMake and I did read the C++ 11 book by Bjarne Stroustrup (I found it second hand on ebay I think).

> What you like as a language (or syntax) and what you roll your eyes at are obviously not technological or merit-based arguments.

They aren't. What I am trying to convey is that it feels like a lot of things are done because it is the new shiny thing and it is good for resume/CV padding.

> "Weird" I can't quite place as an argument either.

The return keyword is optional IIRC in some circumstances. I think that is weird. I think I stopped there because I just wasn't enjoying learning it and there are zero jobs in my area of it.

> Use what you like. We all do the same.

The issue is that I think it (Rust) is going to worm it way everywhere and I will be forced to deal with it.