i'd like to point out that C++26's reflection is the third reflection standard defined by the language to cover the "niche corner cases" that have hereto been lacking from the other two (RTTI and type traits). this specific "niche corner case" also would not exist if C++ did not commit to a poorly-bolted on feature that turned out to be accidentally powerful, and instead intentionally designed powerful metaprogramming facilities from day 1.

there's a point at which "pragmatism" starts being anything but, and it was around C++11 give or take a standard. how on earth do you use it day to day and not feel the schizophrenic non-design being a generalized property across the whole language?

Hey buddy, maybe not liking something is not the same thing as not understanding it? Maybe saying, "this specific feature is bad" is not a generalization to the entire language? Maybe niche corner cases are evidence of poorly chosen primitives and bad design? Maybe jumping straight to smarm and skipping past actually defending the feature means you probably create a work environment no one wants to be in? And an esoteric paradigm like "constexpr two-stepping" that is explained in the article by linking a video that is _over an hour long_ is a perfect example of something that, while perhaps the author and demonstrator explored more for fun instead of as a serious thing to do, would only ever be put into a production code base by the most amateur of architecture astronauts, shortly before their startup fails?

For real though, defend constexpr two-stepping as a real use case for serious people.

Or did you just get a little bit confused and think the criticism here is actually coming from people who are out of their depth from hearing "compile time optimization" or don't know what reflection is?