Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone because programmers get bored.

People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language.

Defining OO as based on the use of class hierarchies and virtual functions is also practical in that it provides some guidance as to where OO is likely to be successful.

Our civilization depends critically on software, and we have a dangerously low degree of professionalism in the computer fields

Tom [Cargil]s suggestion with a further idea: Propsers of new [C++] features should be required to donate a kidney. That would - Jim [Waldo] pointed out - make people think hard before proposing, and even people without any sense would propose at most two extensions.

It is easy to study the rules of overloading and of templates without noticing that together they are one of the keys to elegant and efficient type-safe containers.

The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.