So happy to see Andrei Alexandrescu was included in this documentary. His book on modern C++ design was a mind opener at the time I read it. Maybe still is today. Anybody else read it?
It still amuses me, but Andrei's books were the "last straw" that pushed me away from C++ for many years. Great books, truly, and they helped cement the notion that I wanted to move on to a different language. (Go, at the time.)
I seriously hated the book, too. The title should have been "Cute template tricks to make you feel smart and increase compile time, when to use: approximately never". I think about two things from the book caught on, one of them how to deal with lists of template arguments pre C++11. It's kind of horrible, but was sometimes (more or less) necessary.
Yes, I feel the same way. I met Andrei once on a Meetup in Munich, basically telling him that he taught me how to think which led to a somewhat awkward conversion. Fun times nonetheless :-)
I read it recently. I liked a few of the chapters especially how policy classes fix some issues with OO design. I do recommend asking an AI chatbot to summarize each chapter and say what the modern equivalent is since some of the idioms have improved. I think one whole section was obsoleted through the use of std::variant and std::visit.
It also caused developers to produce template-heavy code that took minutes to compile. We used to joke that these developers were "bitten by Alexandrescu".
But it was indeed a nice book that really made stataic polymorphism popular. Before that, most books focused on building object hierarchies with virtual functions, etc.