C++ isn't a language like Java where language features and coding styles are handed down from on high. You get to -- you have to -- make your own decisions about which language features are useful for which purposes. Announcements of new C++ features are not, and never were, declarations that the "right way to code" was about to change. Nobody forced you to change the way you coded except by offering better ways, and what's the harm in that? Your "feature treadmill" is not compulsory unless you compulsively keep up with the Joneses (the Alexandrescus? but apparently he has moved on to D now.) The C++ coding style where I work has been the same for at least five years. The C++ coding style at my old shop evolved a little while I was there, but only because I wrote most of the code and was still learning, not because we were adopting new language features.

Anyway, have fun with C; it is certainly a language where you won't run into solutions to any problems you don't have, or solutions for very many other problems, for that matter.

P.S. Andrei Alexandrescu's book Modern C++ Design was published in 2001. That's ten years ago. How much has changed between then and now?

Really? C++ is perhaps the slowest moving language in my repertoire in terms of 'popular' approaches to solving common problems. Look how long a c++0x specification has taken.

And also, www.boost.org. Don't code c++ without it.

Hmm, well, I'm relatively young so I guess I missed all those broken promises :P Still, I think the "trying to code like C in C++" point still stands.