[zzrrt]

I’m probably guilty of gratuitous template stuff, because it adds fun to the otherwise boring code I spend a lot of time on. But I feel like the 90% cutdowns are when someone used copy-paste instead of templates, overloads, and inheritance. I don’t think both problems happen at the same time, though, or maybe I misunderstood.

[summerlight]

When people are obsessed with over-abstraction and over-generalization, you can often see FizzBuzz Enterprise in action where a single switch statement is more than enough.

[account42]

I see that more with inheritance including pure virtual interface for things that only have one implementation and actor patterns that make the execution flow unnecessarily hard to follow. Basically, Java written in C++.

Most templates are much easier to read in comparison.

[summerlight]

Agreed that template itself is not the problem but people are. It is still arguable that template is much more of fun to write clever codes because of its meta programming capability as well as its runtime performance advantages.

With a pure virtual interface you can at least track down the execution path as long as you can spot down where the object is created, but with template black magics? Good luck. Static dispatch with all those type traits and SFINAE practically makes it impossible to know before running it. Concept was supposed to solve this but this won't automatically solve all those problems lurking in legacy codes.