Ah.. I wish it were that simple!

Unfortunately, because of third party libraries, you don't actually have a choice whether or not you want to use templates.

Because of STL, you don't actually have a choice either.

There are enough libraries using that junk that,as any developer of a large C++ system can attest, at some point you are forced to use them, unless you take the extreme stance that you are going to program everything yourself. That approach may work fine for (some) open source projects, but not in the real world.

Also, most people will berate you if you try to write your own list or hash map, instead of the STL. So in essence, there is also a peer pressure to use them.

So yes, while it is "techanically" possible to not use them, in practice, they always find a way into your project, like it or not. And I choose not to like it. :)

What follows is all IMHO, of course you are welcome to your own opinion as well.

I've struggled with large C++ codebases on a number of different projects, and while I admit that it is a powerful language, the problem is that there are a half a dozen different ways to do things. The fact that they are trying to give the language even more expressive power is just adding to the amount of rope that we as developers can hang ourselves with.

I yearn for a language which is functionally complete, compiled, small, fast, cross-platform, and oh, NO TEMPLATES PLEASE! Templates/Generics are a blight (a blight I say!) on modern programming -- to say I was pissed when they added them to C# and Java was an understatement. I like my languages without too much syntactic sugar, thanks.

In general, OO programming was never fully grokked by the masses. People spent far too much time trying to make their objects re-usable, and not enough time solving the problem at hand. At least with a language like C you are not fooling yourself, you can write in a procedural style and be happy.

Don't get me wrong, C has a lot of short-comings as well. D is almost perfect, but again, the template blight has reared its ugly head.

I know, a lot of people love templates, and they will argue that they are faster, or they are safer because of type-safety. Faster? Maybe .. slightly .. but not enough for me to want them. Safer? Well not if you take into account the fact that you are using C++, probably the most dangerous language to work with of all. I'll cast the result of my collection operation manually, thanks.

Plus, you make the compiler work really hard, and your project now takes 40 minutes to compile instead of 5. Thanks for the productivity gains, but no thanks!

That sounds complicated.

Are you really sure you want to jump into that without a review first?