OSNews article about C++09 degenerates into C++ vs. D discussion

[Steve Horne]

On Thu, 23 Nov 2006 01:52:01 +0900, Bill Baxter <wbaxter at gmail.com>
wrote:

>Don Clugston wrote:
>
>> Well, now that we have IFTI and tuples(!) I seriously don't think any 
>> template affectionado is likely to evaluate D negatively in that regard.
>> Once the word gets around, I think there'll be a lot of defections.
>
>Metaprogramming in C++ is OOP in C all over again.  Sure you can do it, 
>but...  they definitely didn't have that in mind when they designed the 
>language, so it ain't gonna be pretty.

I saw someone asking about the VC++ __if_exists and something like
static if in a GCC discussion once, about whether GCC would support
it. The reply was that template metaprogramming creates unmaintainable
messes and shouldn't be encouraged.

And I thought to myself - but metaprogramming isn't going away,
presumably because it is needed. And most of the reason for the mess
is that conditional parts need to be handled using specialisation
rather than simple conditionals. So why not make life simpler and more
maintainable?

I was going to say so, but that would have meant registering and blah
blah, and I put it off to the later that never happens. Which is a
shame. It needed saying.

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