The fear of new things... 3 ideas for C++.

I wonder why we, or at least I, react with so much fear to new ideas.

Or even old ideas!

In my time I have, in various Usenet groups, even called people bad things for
promoting the following ideas, which I now see very little wrong with, at least
when they're not abused for problems they're not applicable to:

   * Post-constructors and pre-destructors.
     Advanced by Andrei over in clc++m. He thought it would help especially
     with X-windows programming. I then thought it was ridiculous, fearing
     an escalation to N-phase initialization -- instead of looking for
     solutions to the bad-usage problems I envisioned.

   * Exception-free programming.
     Advanced by someone I don't recall in [no.it.programmering.c++]. I think
     I called that person "brain-dead" or something like that. But the fact is
     that many shops do exception-free C++ programming, e.g. at Opera (which is
     about 16 minutes' walk from where I live), not to mention Google. It's just
     that it isn't C++ as I know it. It's their kind of C++.

   * Oh, sorry.
     I had three ideas in mind when I started to write this but the third one
     disappeared. I can't recall. Perhaps I feared that one so much that Mr.
     Freud's "forgetfulness" has kicked in.

Anyways... Oh yes, I could have written up using 'signed' for non-negative value
ranges, because I once agreed with the position of using 'unsigned' and argued
vociferously against anyone suggesting using 'signed', but it's been a long time
since I changed my mind about that. It was not the third idea above.

But I'm sure that there must be many more ideas like these, ideas that we shoot
down almost instinctively because they at first appear to be so different, so
alien, so /non-conforming/, that they must be wrong, somehow.

And then, after shooting down the idea, taking years to realize that it's
perhaps not so stupid and dangerous after all. And when one does, one wonders
why that should take years? I'm guessing some people don't change their minds at
all, though, happily deluding themselves about not having been wrong.

Cheers,

- Alf (introspective)