That's one of the benefits of designing the language such that using it normally forces people to share valuable information about programs without them knowing it.
A somewhat related example is how Emacs was built to support introspective programming, where nearly anything can be inspected to provide a docstring. This is both invaluable when extending the editor and only possible because Emacs established conventions early on about documenting public objects. Though it isn't obligatory to document things, the audience Emacs appeals to seemed to keep doing so through force of momentum over the years. I find this momentum incredibly important to have.
The problem is you can't just shoehorn this way of thinking onto any arbitrary language/programming environment, because the issue of dependencies following whatever code annotations they have arises. For C++ it's hopeless to imagine we can expect these annotation benefits to be universal because using the language didn't obligate adding them in some way, so the vast majority of people didn't. The author mentions there aren't even any real-world codebases using them. Every corner of the system/language has to be designed from the beginning with annotation in mind.
I've been pining over the same issue as I'm trying to design a "living system" that supports user extension. I'm still wondering if I'm missing anything that could help with introspection, is not detrimental to user experience and can only be added in the nascent stage the project is in. Once all the conventions are in place, everything will have to be built on top of them no matter how imperfect they are.
A somewhat related example is how Emacs was built to support introspective programming, where nearly anything can be inspected to provide a docstring. This is both invaluable when extending the editor and only possible because Emacs established conventions early on about documenting public objects. Though it isn't obligatory to document things, the audience Emacs appeals to seemed to keep doing so through force of momentum over the years. I find this momentum incredibly important to have.
The problem is you can't just shoehorn this way of thinking onto any arbitrary language/programming environment, because the issue of dependencies following whatever code annotations they have arises. For C++ it's hopeless to imagine we can expect these annotation benefits to be universal because using the language didn't obligate adding them in some way, so the vast majority of people didn't. The author mentions there aren't even any real-world codebases using them. Every corner of the system/language has to be designed from the beginning with annotation in mind.
I've been pining over the same issue as I'm trying to design a "living system" that supports user extension. I'm still wondering if I'm missing anything that could help with introspection, is not detrimental to user experience and can only be added in the nascent stage the project is in. Once all the conventions are in place, everything will have to be built on top of them no matter how imperfect they are.