[Cryptography] encoding formats should not be committee'ized

[James A. Donald]

On 2013-10-02 05:18, Jerry Leichter wrote:
> To be blunt, you have no idea what you're talking about. I worked at 
> Google until a short time ago; Ben Laurie still does. Both of us have 
> written, submitted, and reviewed substantial amounts of code in the 
> Google code base. Do you really want to continue to argue with us 
> about what the Google Style Guide is actually understood within Google?

The google style guide, among other things, prohibits multiple direct 
inheritance and operator overloading, except where stl makes you do 
operator overloading.

Thus it certainly prohibits too-clever code.  The only debatable 
question is whether protobufs, and much of the rest of the old codebase, 
is too-clever code - and it certainly a lot more clever than operator 
overloading.

Such prohibitions also would prohibit the standard template library, 
except that that is also grandfathered in, and prohibits atl and wtl.

The style guide is designed for an average and typical programmer who is 
not as smart as the early google programmers.   If you prohibit anything 
like wtl, you prohibit the best.

Prohibiting programmers from using multiple inheritance is like the BBC 
prohibiting the world "literally" instead of mandating that it be used 
correctly.  It implies that the BBC does not trust its speakers to 
understand the correct use of literally, and google does not trust its 
programmers to understand the correct use of multiple direct inheritance.