I think about wanting to play with one of the C/C++ killers (rust, nim, zig, odin, jai if it ever sees wide release, etc.) I get excited about many safety nets and advanced features I could benefit from. I <3 the comptime keyword in Zig
And then I think about the side projects I want to work on, and how so many involve C++-only libs or are made easier by using the C++ version of libs (i.e. ImGui, Wwise, bgfx) and I really don't want to spend my free time writing C wrappers to make ffi easier.
And then I think about how I want to work on either my macbook or my windows desktop, so just getting something going means spending time fucking around with the current crop of meta build systems because I can't stomach defaulting to cmake
And so rather than deal with this I go and watch anime or whatever.
It's the concept of "programming war crimes" yet again. How many interesting projects or research breakthroughs don't happen because the person who would have made them happen decided it wasn't worth the incidental effort.
Not to imply I'd contribute anything to revolutionary, rather I'm thinking about people like ThePhD who are taking it upon themselves to do important things like solve the text encoding and locale problem in C and C++ and wondering how much of their effort is forestalled by tech plaque.