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Comment by tenderfault | Hacker News Reader

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?

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His talks are some of my favorites; he's a great speaker. Very engaging and has a great sense of humor, which he uses to great effect.

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 :-)

1. Find your hero

2. Meet your hero

3. Start an awkward conversation with your hero.

It always goes like this no matter what you try.

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.

Agreed, _Modern C++ Design_ is probably the programming book I've gotten the most out of in my career.

hmm, yes it's interesting but honestly - not much of the stuff is usable IRL

the only thing i was regularly using (Loki library) for was the assoc_vector

Of course, all his books are a must read.

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