I teach engineering programming at a community college. This is a pre-engineering class for students who will transfer to a university engineering program. We teach C++. There is no consensus from the universities that the students usually transfer to as to what language to teach.

Some schools want Matlab, some C++, some don’t care. One school’s electrical engineering program wants Fortran. All are ok with C++.

I have traditionally taught what I call classic C++. I have incorporated a few things from C++11. Mainly the random number library as it provides better random number methods than older C++. What else from the newer standards should be added to the class?

The one thing from C++20 that I really want to include is the format library. The trouble is that it is still not supported in many compliers. The library provide formatting that is similar to formatting in Python. I have never been a fan of the C++ formatting and finally they have updated the way we can output information. When the compilers support the new format, I will add that.

Vectors are also something added in C++11 that need to be covered. It provides more functionality than classic arrays.

When you search for examples of C++, you get very few examples using C++11 or newer functions, methods, and libraries. Does that mean that they are not being adopted or that users are just not posting about them? This could be an advantage in class since it would be harder for the students to lookup answers.

I guess that I will stick with mostly classical C++ for now since this is a beginning class.