Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. -- Albert Camus

The ease/comfort of our so-called "Modern Civilization" is built on illusions constructed intentionally by people-in-power/govts-in-collusion. People are kept distracted and managed using techniques of propaganda and reflexive control.

The developed/richer countries take advantage of the developing/poorer countries by offshoring dangerous/poisonous/etc. industries/work onto them while mouthing platitudes and absolving themselves of all responsibilities.

If you start asking questions (and educate yourself) on how-a-thing-comes-to-be from first principles, what happens to it after its end-of-life, the effects on the people involved in the entire chain (from birth to death) you will rise up in arms to tear the system down and rebuild it all.

Here for example is a shocking article on waste tyres from around the world being sent to India to be disposed off and how the entire process literally poisons poor people forced to do that job; The Black Wind: How India is becoming the World's Waste Tyre Furnace - https://www.reporters-collective.in/trc/india-is-becoming-wo...

> Driving is a fascinating ritual with vastly differing norms across regions. It would be interesting to learn if anthropologists have studied this

And Psychologists!

Reading the comments in this thread is quite amusing.

As a driver in India, i can tell you anything goes as long as you don't get into an accident (which may/may-not kill you) or get caught by the police.

No rules matter and the only goal is to "one-up" everybody else on the road and if they are trying to "one-up" you, then prevent it by any means possible. It is a "game of chicken" in its purest form; game theory in action. Rules are mere suggestions only followed by the meek and the weak.

You have no idea how invigorating it is to drive in India.

> I know I could do C++, and you could argue that's better, but I find C++ to be exceptionally irritating to use. Every time I've used C++ I get people telling me I'm using it "wrong", sometimes in contradictory ways. Sometimes I should use a "friend" function, sometimes "friend functions are evil". Sometimes multiple inheritance is fine, sometimes it should be avoided like the plague. Sometimes you should "obviously" use operator overloading, sometimes you should avoid it because it's confusing because you don't know which functions are being called.

That is because you are looking at Design in C++ wrong. Language features and low-level abstractions are just mechanisms. You have to put them into a coherent framework for modeling a problem domain via commonality & variability analysis (aka domain engineering) onto a solution domain consisting of language features, idioms and patterns.

For a very good explanation, see the classic book, Multi-Paradigm Design for C++ by James Coplien.

The above can also be found in his PhD thesis Multi-Paradigm Design available in pdf form here - https://tobeagile.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/CoplienThes...

Not quite.

What i am pointing out are neither complex nor any magic under-the-hood. They are simply techniques in the C++ repertoire well-known since the early 90's and used in all high-performance C++ libraries.

tialaramex made a big deal out of overheads in C++ dynamic dispatch (which incidentally are pretty minimal) using a trivial example, when performance focused (both time and size) C++ programmers do not use it that way at all. Modeling in C++ can be done in any number of ways and is driven by specific perspectives of the end goal.

Your example is disingenuous. What you are stating is the obvious trivial way of doing something when your objective is actually quite different.

You can get exactly what you are asking for in C++ using techniques of static polymorphism and CRTP pattern (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiously_recurring_template_p... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barton%E2%80%93Nackman_trick) along with traits and dynamic dispatch (if needed).

For great examples of the above, see the classic Scientific and Engineering C++: An Introduction with Advanced Techniques and Examples by Barton & Nackman (1994).