Don't Teach Yourself to Code by Writing a Library

It is a terrible idea to teach yourself how to use some unfamiliar feature of C++ by designing a library that heavily uses this feature.

I cannot think of an easily explained example, because libraries that come into existence in this way are very rarely easily explained. Even experienced C++ folks look at the thing and say, "Huh...WHAT?! Can you DO THAT?" Readers with more than a couple years of development experience are grimacing right now, because chances are good that the code they are paid to work in every day relies on a library that some genius thought would be cooler if it all used some tricks they'd been reading about.

It may be cool to the original author, but to anyone who hasn't read the same blogs as the author, it's just mysterious. Especially mysterious when the author has trouble doing what they originally imagined was possible, and ends up covering this lack of experience with a hack, that then lingers long after the author stops working on the library.

Writing libraries is a great time to slow down; to be conservative; to solicit the widest possible review; to ask your peers, "Is this good style?"