Me too, I'm not sure who gets credit for the quote though.

I like the idea of operator overloading a lot. In Ruby it's great. I find it a bit cumbersome in C++ though, things like dealing with friend/global functions, e.g. for appending to a stream with <<.

To the credit of operator overloading and templates, they make the standard library interfaces mostly nice.

Unfortunately finalize is incredibly quirky as you have absolutely no say or guarantee about when your object will be gc'd. I've tried a few times to find the "right" way to use finalize and it seems to be almost always discouraged.

For me: What makes C++ difficult is ++. :)

Getting rid of memory management and multiple inheritance from C++ doesn't begin to give you Java.

Operator overloading? virtual, pure virtual functions? namespaces (not quite like packages)? Templates? (Even Java generics are less convoluted.) Destructors? Global variables? Const correctness?

I'm not much of a fan of Java (the language), but C++ is just awful. I waste more time when I write C++ than I gain (compared to writing object-oriented C).

C++: An octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog.

Shotgun blast to their joy department...

I don't know what that means, but I think I like the sound of it.

Why don't we just kill them, pickle their corpses and tape a Yak-Bak to their jars that plays "Yes mom I love you"?

Bonus if you have that awesome one that lets you fuck with the pitch of their voice.

Yes. Panic button == my parents are panicking. What could possibly be more compelling (and guilt-forming) to a kid than something that makes their parents leap out of their chair pounding a big red panic button?

Fun thing to try with your kids: next time they break some stupid little thing, yell "oh my god", act flustered, hide the remains quickly and insist that they never speak of it again. Let sit for 8-10 years or until emotional problems are fully developed.

Brainwashing:
1) reduce target to the mentality of a child
2) imprint them with the values you want them to have.

There is no difference, kids just come pre-washed.

fixed

"By Design"

Tags are more of a pain to maintain, but can be more useful. I actually make use of the genre tag quite a bit (after fixing the genre tags on my songs to whatever I feel like calling them). Having a ton of compilation albums, I like being able to search by artist and find single tracks on V/A's that otherwise I'd forget were there. Etc.

Organizing on the filesystem is fine and has its advantages too, unless you own an ipod or other music player that organizes by tags. It's enough of a pain to fix a thousand filenames or to fix a thousand sets of tags, but I don't want to do both. I'd rather ignore the filenames or have my music player name/rename/move things for me based on the tags.