[nly]

Part of this is Scott Meyers style. I have nothing against him personally, he just presents a different perspective, which is important, but for me he doesn't really write or talk about C++ in a way that is very useful to me as a C++ programmer.

Several of the techniques he promoted in 'Effective C++' (an old book now, I will concede) are and were, imho, somewhat unhealthy for the sake of being cautious. Another example are his recent talks on "universal references", introduced a whole fuzzy concepts to paper over one simple rule when rvalue references are combined with templates and type deduction.

His 'grunt on the ground' comment is typical of his humour, but he's really a bit of a navel-gazer... I don't think the difference between direct and copy initialization for type deduction of initializer lists is really going to make a difference to most C++ programmers work. The C++ committee generally does a very good job, and the fixes introduced by this change will most likely make a much greater positive impact.