I claim that by eliminating the C/C++-style dichotomy between headers and implementation, most modern programming languages have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater! Photo credit: StubbyFingers (Flickr)
If that sounds crazy, just hang with me for a minute.
I know my claim runs counter to popular wisdom; have a look at this thread on stackoverflow.com. Designers of languages like python and go and D and ruby and java consider it a feature that developers don’t have two redundant pictures of the same functionality. This comment from the C# 5.0 specification is typical:
“Because an assembly is a self-describing unit of functionality containing both code and metadata, there is no need for #include directives and header files in C#. The public types and members contained in a particular assembly are made available in a C# program simply by referencing that assembly when compiling the program” (p 3).
I agree.
Sort of…
Bad headers are a royal pain
It can be onerous to maintain the parallelism between a .h and a .cpp. And most C/C++ headers are managed so poorly that the benefits you might claim for them are theoretical rather than real. Three common antipatterns that I particularly detest: Continue reading