I don't mean to go about writing my web applications in C++. I do plan to write at least a couple for my job that are really performance sensitive. I'd like to use this opportunity to learn and educate myself as I believe a good web software engineer needs to have this kind of knowledge. What if I ever need to hack some code in or out of my web server (nginx, for example)? What if I need to rewrite some really slow code in a C++-based background daemon that communicates with my main application through protocol buffers or something? That's kind of thing I'm thinking about.