About operator overloading, some languages have seemless bignums without allowing users to overload operators in their own classes. For containers, this could have been restricted to the index operator.
But it's not just about indexes or certain containers. Sure, C++ makes things unwieldy, but the solution is not to drop operator overloading in its entirety. Rust wants to take on C++ head to head. For graphics programming and certain applications, operator overloading makes life a lot easier, and is a very welcome addition.
Take a look at Scala for an arguably worse implementation of operator overloading. Though still, the IDE helps a lot there.
Surely "a + b" is nicer to the eye than "a.add(b)", but unless a and b are numbers, a method call with a meaningful name is more straightforward than any abuse of allowed operators.
> Take a look at Scala for an arguably worse implementation of operator overloading.
Indeed
> Though still, the IDE helps a lot there.
If I need an IDE to understand some code, and tend to stay away from that code/language.
What if a and b are numbers? What if they're matrices? What if they're quaternions -- or higher? What if they're finite fields? Additive groups? Points on an elliptic curve? Random variables?
Operators (+ - * / ^ & | ¬) come from mathematics. While I'm sure there are plenty of node jockeys who have little use for numbers outside of specifying ports, there are still plenty of us for whom operator overloading is a necessary good.
About operator overloading, some languages have seemless bignums without allowing users to overload operators in their own classes. For containers, this could have been restricted to the index operator.