Think of how much easier it would have been if all you needed to do to prove your identity was supply a bit of blood or a swab rubbed against the inside of your mouth?
I think you must have missed the part where my whole life was erased and replaced with this other guy's...
I provided the tax office with numerous details that would have confirmed my identity, had any of my past addresses still been on their system, my date of birth not been changed to his, and my past employers still been listed on my tax records, for example. If everything is linked up to a centralised DNA database and then someone makes the same mistake -- but this time connecting my DNA to someone else -- how am I ever supposed to prove who I really am then?
"Can you give us a DNA sample, sir, to prove what you say is true?"
"Sure, here you go."
"I'm sorry sir, but our DNA database confirms beyond doubt that you are really Mr A. Criminal of no fixed abode. Now be nice and put the cuffs on, K?"
Hmm... Your posts are usually much better than that, so I'm guessing you're tired, drunk, or high. Fair 'nuff.
In any case, I think you're making my point beautifully. Of course children can be a source of great joy; I'm not challenging that at all. Many people would also enjoy teaching a newbie programmer, or gain a sense of satisfaction from helping someone less experience out on-line. (In my real life guise, I've got thousands of newsgroup posts logged doing just that.)
But a child will not teach a 25-year-old to drive, or to use calculus, or to appreciate art, or to consider the ethics of contemporary voting systems. Nor will a child build a new set of shelves, repair a car, or write a touching birthday card to your mother. If you want to develop these aspects of your life, you would look elsewhere. So it is when it comes to programming. There is much to be gained from mentoring a more junior developer, and if that is your desire, then I wish you nothing but success. That doesn't mean it's everyone's desire, and the things to be gained may not be the things that would be most beneficial if the programming in question is something you're doing professionally.
hence the need for little bits of plastic with some magic number on them.
Ironically, I have in my wallet my government-supplied National Insurance numbercard, which does indeed confirm my NI number. Unfortunately, it was in my wallet when some probably tired and underpaid office worker on the far side of the country mistyped the number, too. Glad that helped, then.
It is necessary to transfer knowledge from more experienced people to less experienced people. Senior level people cannot expect to work in a vacuum.
Both of those things may be true, but there is a big difference between "not working in a vacuum" and "never having time to work on something alone and uninterrupted". A strong dislike of the latter situation does not imply that you are "not a team player".
As is often the case, the best programmers don't necessarily make the best programming teachers, nor vice versa. Sometimes junior guys will benefit more from a training course. Sometimes they'll get more out of working on something with a mentor available when they need one. Working full-time with a much stronger developer would just intimidate the hell out of a lot of people and cause their productivity to plummet.
As I said before, the art of good management is to make the best use of all your people. The first step to that is acknowledging their respective strengths and weaknesses. The second step is figuring out how to take best advantage of the former while avoiding the latter as much as possible. If that means taking a guy who can write excellent, highly maintainable code and leaving him to get on with it most of the time, so be it.
Slashdotters love what you're saying, though, because it supports their ideas that they should be able to ignore everyone else and work alone on a project. Enjoy the mod points.
That would be an overly naive and/or arrogant attitude, unbecoming of a senior developer. However, the alternative explanation is that some of slashdot's moderators appreciate the point that this is a management issue, which needs to account for individuality. And while it's nice to know some people found my post insightful, I didn't make it for the karma, and have plenty of that already, thanks.
I mean, if the recordings were only done for private purposes and only involve adults, kicking the guy out and destroying the evidence sounds like a reasonable punishment.
It does? That sounds like no punishment at all to me.
What is the disincentive to stop this guy doing it again? They should destroy all known copies, lock him up and/or fine him a fortune, and set a condition that if any copy ever surfaces in the future, he gets locked up and/or fined a fortune again. Something like this ought to become an example to anyone else thinking of violating someone's dignity in the same way in future.
The more experienced partner needs to just put up with the "annoyance" of explaining things to other people. It's called teamwork, and he/she needs to get used to it.
I've seen this mistake in numerous contexts, from programming to pairs sports. If you put two people together of very different abilities, there really is very little for the more senior partner to gain. Sure, they can pick up the odd thing occasionally, but not enough to keep them motivated and justify the time they "waste". Likewise, teaching can be a useful way to solidify knowledge, but that only works if the abilities are different but not too different. Getting a world champion to coach an absolute beginner will be frustrating for both. Getting a 20-year veteran to teach programming 101 to a newbie by drip-feeding on the job will be frustrating for both.
The art of good management/coaching in these situations is to pair up appropriate people, and only appropriate people. If you do, it can be a rewarding experience for both parties. If you don't, the senior guys will simply decide it's not worth it and walk away, leaving you with only the junior guys left. Good management consists of making the best use of all your resources, not dumping half the guys with things they really don't want to do and calling it "teamwork".
FWIW, I don't rate full-time pair programming in most places. IME, a culture where junior developers feel able to ask for help as often as required and senior developers are happy to give it whenever they can, and where training and review are taken seriously, gains you most or all of the benefits without anyone getting claustrophobic and feeling under permanent pressure. This has been the case in pretty much every good dev team I've ever worked on.
Though it saddens me to say it, I'm amazed that there are so many people connected to FOSS in there at all. If this is intended to be a list of "global trend setters" in technology (no flames, please, I can't read the article either) then FOSS is really a very small blip in the ocean. Perhaps the credit to people like Linus and RMS is intended to be symbolic, but really, I doubt most people making serious decisions have ever heard of anything they've done recently, or appreciate what they are (and, for that matter, really aren't) responsible for.
I'd expect the big "trend setters" to be those with truly wide influence. For example, compare the number of developers working on all GPL'd projects with the number of developers using Java, and consider therefore the relative weight of RMS's opinion against that of, say, Gosling. Compare the effect of a slashdotting with the number of hits on a site like the BBC that laughs at one, and consider therefore the relative weight of slashdot editors against that of, say, the BBC News Online editorial team. Of course these comparisons are somewhat apples vs. oranges, but you get the idea.
In other words, if you're looking for people with the greatest influence on technology, I'd expect it to be those who control Big Technologies -- possibly including the obvious people from places like MS, Sun, IBM and Apple, but remember there's more to technology than personal computing and programming -- and those who commentate on those Big Technologies when that commentary will in turn be read by the next-level-down decision-makers.
BGates has certainly created influence in the industry. His draconian licensing terms has created a bigger interest in GPL and BSD licensing (and others). His insistance on a closed software model has created more interest in open source projects like Apache.
I think you're giving Microsoft far too much credit. There has always been freeware, since the dawn of personal computing, it's just that today some of it comes with random abbreviations and personal philosophies attached.
Whether that's an improvement on simply giving your stuff away out of charity is left as an exercise for the reader, but either way, it's hard to see how Microsoft has really contributed to it. I doubt many people or companies really choose GPL alternatives to MS software because of the open sourceness. It's just that there aren't a lot of credible alternatives in some markets right now.
The danger with things like DNA databases isn't if people use them properly, than if they abuse them.
Actually, from direct personal experience, the biggest problem with massive and centralised databases isn't malicious abuse. Rather, it's old-fashioned operator error, but now of the "one wrong number typed and someone's life gets turned upside down for months" kind.
Unfortunately, there is often an implicit culture of denial: the database is "almost perfect", so the procedures for fixing the effects of imperfections are rarely fully thought through, and often far more time-consuming and error-prone than they should be.
FWIW, I was over-taxed by several hundred pounds after someone at a tax office mistyped my National Insurance number (for our US friends: like a SSN, but in the UK) by one character, and inadvertently merged me with someone on the far side of the country. The scary part wasn't so much that I lost some money for a while, but that the first time I knew about it was when my pay-cheque turned up short and I queried it with my employer's accountant; no-one thought to check with me that my status really had changed. Worse, it took three months chasing numerous tax officials and accountants in several offices to get it fixed, because they didn't believe I existed -- the linked computer records had automatically messed up all my identifying information and confused it with the other guy's.
If that could happen to me a couple of years ago, think what's going to happen when your whole life -- medical records, benefits payments, criminal record and "unofficial" black marks, etc. -- are all tied in to the uebersystem, and then that same human in that same office has to type the same hundreds of nine-digit codes perfectly every day.
I was planning on having a all-day LOTR showing on my 36" widescreen for a few friends. But with it now pushing probably 14 hours with mealtimes and whatnot...jeez.
/me smiles knowingly, notes that it is now almost 8pm here, and puts away his DVD box set of "24".:-)
George needs to learn that money is not everything. Piss off your hardcore fans and suddenly you find yourself in a world of shit.
Or the fans need to learn that pissing off your hardcore fans is not everything, depending on your point of view. Lucas is a businessman, and as far as I can see, a very good one.
I, for one, hate the man. He had some great visions and great films, but he shows his true colors over and over
Of course, it's your prerogative to dislike the man if you see fit, and to express your personal opinion of his work. However, whether it is someone's prerogative to run a satire on the original using part of the original work, which seems to be the case here, is another question.
I think that's the penalty if you dual-class at different levels. You probably get Fireball around level 11 PSU if you're still at level 2 Cooling System.
From my read on this, the "level" would be something broadcast from the bios, so as to protect users from trying to run incompatible software on their system and complaining when it doesn't work.
Sorry, where does anything say that? I missed it. Considering that Intel and co. seem to be moving away from a classical BIOS as fast as they can, and that the peripheral/component guys are hardly going to support a scheme that would reduce their sales, I don't see the credibility here.
Let's see... I can take a 100Hp subaru from 1994 and rip out the drivetrain, put in parts from a STi, crank it up to 600 Hp and drive on down the road.
Sure, but unless you really know what you're doing, the overall experience will still suck compared to a real STi, because you won't have the suspension, brakes, etc. to match the performance. It'll probably cost you a lot more than just buying an STi from a Subaru dealer, too. At the risk of over-soundbiting, the overall package is more than the sum of its parts, and the weakest link in the chain is what matters.
The same is true of PCs. How many people do you know who go out and try to make up their own system, choosing all the parts, put it together themselves, only to find the performance sucks compared to what they could have had out of the box, for 75% of the price, from any decent supplier, all because they didn't appreciate the need for {more RAM | faster CPU | higher-rated PSU | the right connectivity options | better monitor | etc}?
I think a simple scheme for Joe Average-Gamer is a great idea. Most people don't care, or want to care, about whether a 3200+ Athlon 64 is faster than a Pentium IV (or whatever they're up to now) 9.73THz. They want a PC that writes a letter, or browses the web, or can play Half-life 2 when it comes out. For these people, knowing that their system was up to "level 6" games would make life easier.
The tweakers will tweak, or build their own systems, as they always have, and I imagine game vendors will still publish recommended minimum spec and the reviewers will still tell you what you really need instead. Nothing about having a level system precludes all of that, and given the number of top-end gamers who like to tweak, do you really think the game manufacturers would stop them doing it?
For the record, I've been building my own systems since forever, I tend to buy top-end games a few months after they come out, and I drive a WRX.:-)
Are you seriously claiming that it takes five times as long to write
x
=
x
+
1
as it takes to write
x = x + 1
?
No, of course not, but no serious programming language does that. It does, however, take a roughly proportionate amount of time to write realistic code. I found around half a dozen comparative programming language studies whose data are consistent with this proposition (although that wasn't necessarily what they were testing) in about five minutes using Google, so if you care to learn something rather than making silly arguments the option is there for you.
And by the way, lines of code are a good metric for productivity in the right context. We aren't comparing programmers here, we're comparing the relative power of different languages based on the effectiveness of a diverse sample of programmers of each. Don't parrot, think.
Almost every basic I/O library, from C's printf() to Java's System.out.println() to Perl's print(), forces you to specify the order that the arguments are displayed.
Sure, and they all suck, as demonstrated by the fact that pretty much no serious UI code uses them. They are child's toys, and several decades after the invention of printf, you'd hope we knew better.
That has nothing to do with operator overloading.
No, it doesn't, but then neither do the major problems with C++ I/O streams. That was kinda my point.
To me a.add(b) is not any less clear than a + b, + a b or a b + which are all equivalent expressions.
In a simple case, no. But one approach scales much, much better than the other, as exemplified in several code samples posted in this discussion. There's also the generic algorithm issue that is usually over-looked in this debate, which I've mentioned in other posts.
If you are doing thousands of lines of codes with only formulas in a language like Java or C++ you are doing something wrong.
Well, since no other mainstream language is even close to being able to do what we do every day in C++ at work, I'll respectfully disagree on that one. As for Java,/me looks at discussion title, notes the question mark, and smiles.
You are never too old to enjoy fantasy, either. I live in Cambridge (as in the famous university) and it's safe to say that just about everybody I know here has read all the HP books, particularly all the students...
I guess in jolly olde england where they only have two channels, and you have to pay a tithe to watch them, radio is still a valid form of entertainment.
The secret, my dear fellow, is that on the two channels here in Blighty one can actually find something worthy of watching...
It's five now, by the way, if you exclude satellite, cable, etc.
While many of your points (for either side) have merit, I think it's important to remember that programming is a skill. It is not something just anyone can do, and doing it well requires a sufficient level of knowledge and ability. If you're working with people who Just Don't Get It(TM) so badly that they write misleading operator overloads, then you have far bigger problems than the presence of operator overloading in your language.
Languages can protect against careless errors: everyone knows you shouldn't dereference a NULL pointer, but in some languages, you have the option to do so by mistake. But languages cannot protect against a lack of understanding of how to use your tools, no matter how restrictive they may be.
Serious answer - it's not the notation "+". That's the good thing. It's the *SIDE EFFECTS* man. How do you *know* it was overloaded 10 million lines of code away.
How do you know what any function call you make is going to do in detail in a project that size?
The answer is: you don't.
But then again, you shouldn't need to. You trust that the function is going to do the job its interface says it will, and anything that doesn't is a bug. Of course, the same is true of any other function you call you make anywhere in high level code.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you must have missed the part where my whole life was erased and replaced with this other guy's...
I provided the tax office with numerous details that would have confirmed my identity, had any of my past addresses still been on their system, my date of birth not been changed to his, and my past employers still been listed on my tax records, for example. If everything is linked up to a centralised DNA database and then someone makes the same mistake -- but this time connecting my DNA to someone else -- how am I ever supposed to prove who I really am then?
"Can you give us a DNA sample, sir, to prove what you say is true?"
"Sure, here you go."
"I'm sorry sir, but our DNA database confirms beyond doubt that you are really Mr A. Criminal of no fixed abode. Now be nice and put the cuffs on, K?"
Yes, I speak English, thanks. It was a rather feeble attempt at humour; I couldn't manage something genuinely funny in this context.
Hmm... Your posts are usually much better than that, so I'm guessing you're tired, drunk, or high. Fair 'nuff.
In any case, I think you're making my point beautifully. Of course children can be a source of great joy; I'm not challenging that at all. Many people would also enjoy teaching a newbie programmer, or gain a sense of satisfaction from helping someone less experience out on-line. (In my real life guise, I've got thousands of newsgroup posts logged doing just that.)
But a child will not teach a 25-year-old to drive, or to use calculus, or to appreciate art, or to consider the ethics of contemporary voting systems. Nor will a child build a new set of shelves, repair a car, or write a touching birthday card to your mother. If you want to develop these aspects of your life, you would look elsewhere. So it is when it comes to programming. There is much to be gained from mentoring a more junior developer, and if that is your desire, then I wish you nothing but success. That doesn't mean it's everyone's desire, and the things to be gained may not be the things that would be most beneficial if the programming in question is something you're doing professionally.
Ironically, I have in my wallet my government-supplied National Insurance numbercard, which does indeed confirm my NI number. Unfortunately, it was in my wallet when some probably tired and underpaid office worker on the far side of the country mistyped the number, too. Glad that helped, then.
Both of those things may be true, but there is a big difference between "not working in a vacuum" and "never having time to work on something alone and uninterrupted". A strong dislike of the latter situation does not imply that you are "not a team player".
As is often the case, the best programmers don't necessarily make the best programming teachers, nor vice versa. Sometimes junior guys will benefit more from a training course. Sometimes they'll get more out of working on something with a mentor available when they need one. Working full-time with a much stronger developer would just intimidate the hell out of a lot of people and cause their productivity to plummet.
As I said before, the art of good management is to make the best use of all your people. The first step to that is acknowledging their respective strengths and weaknesses. The second step is figuring out how to take best advantage of the former while avoiding the latter as much as possible. If that means taking a guy who can write excellent, highly maintainable code and leaving him to get on with it most of the time, so be it.
That would be an overly naive and/or arrogant attitude, unbecoming of a senior developer. However, the alternative explanation is that some of slashdot's moderators appreciate the point that this is a management issue, which needs to account for individuality. And while it's nice to know some people found my post insightful, I didn't make it for the karma, and have plenty of that already, thanks.
It does? That sounds like no punishment at all to me.
What is the disincentive to stop this guy doing it again? They should destroy all known copies, lock him up and/or fine him a fortune, and set a condition that if any copy ever surfaces in the future, he gets locked up and/or fined a fortune again. Something like this ought to become an example to anyone else thinking of violating someone's dignity in the same way in future.
I think you mis-spelled that...
(But seriously, if the law doesn't provide for locking up this weirdo and destroying all the recordings, the law is seriously broken.)
I've seen this mistake in numerous contexts, from programming to pairs sports. If you put two people together of very different abilities, there really is very little for the more senior partner to gain. Sure, they can pick up the odd thing occasionally, but not enough to keep them motivated and justify the time they "waste". Likewise, teaching can be a useful way to solidify knowledge, but that only works if the abilities are different but not too different. Getting a world champion to coach an absolute beginner will be frustrating for both. Getting a 20-year veteran to teach programming 101 to a newbie by drip-feeding on the job will be frustrating for both.
The art of good management/coaching in these situations is to pair up appropriate people, and only appropriate people. If you do, it can be a rewarding experience for both parties. If you don't, the senior guys will simply decide it's not worth it and walk away, leaving you with only the junior guys left. Good management consists of making the best use of all your resources, not dumping half the guys with things they really don't want to do and calling it "teamwork".
FWIW, I don't rate full-time pair programming in most places. IME, a culture where junior developers feel able to ask for help as often as required and senior developers are happy to give it whenever they can, and where training and review are taken seriously, gains you most or all of the benefits without anyone getting claustrophobic and feeling under permanent pressure. This has been the case in pretty much every good dev team I've ever worked on.
Though it saddens me to say it, I'm amazed that there are so many people connected to FOSS in there at all. If this is intended to be a list of "global trend setters" in technology (no flames, please, I can't read the article either) then FOSS is really a very small blip in the ocean. Perhaps the credit to people like Linus and RMS is intended to be symbolic, but really, I doubt most people making serious decisions have ever heard of anything they've done recently, or appreciate what they are (and, for that matter, really aren't) responsible for.
I'd expect the big "trend setters" to be those with truly wide influence. For example, compare the number of developers working on all GPL'd projects with the number of developers using Java, and consider therefore the relative weight of RMS's opinion against that of, say, Gosling. Compare the effect of a slashdotting with the number of hits on a site like the BBC that laughs at one, and consider therefore the relative weight of slashdot editors against that of, say, the BBC News Online editorial team. Of course these comparisons are somewhat apples vs. oranges, but you get the idea.
In other words, if you're looking for people with the greatest influence on technology, I'd expect it to be those who control Big Technologies -- possibly including the obvious people from places like MS, Sun, IBM and Apple, but remember there's more to technology than personal computing and programming -- and those who commentate on those Big Technologies when that commentary will in turn be read by the next-level-down decision-makers.
I'm trying to work out whether the parent post was meant to be funny or not before I reply...
I think you're giving Microsoft far too much credit. There has always been freeware, since the dawn of personal computing, it's just that today some of it comes with random abbreviations and personal philosophies attached.
Whether that's an improvement on simply giving your stuff away out of charity is left as an exercise for the reader, but either way, it's hard to see how Microsoft has really contributed to it. I doubt many people or companies really choose GPL alternatives to MS software because of the open sourceness. It's just that there aren't a lot of credible alternatives in some markets right now.
Actually, from direct personal experience, the biggest problem with massive and centralised databases isn't malicious abuse. Rather, it's old-fashioned operator error, but now of the "one wrong number typed and someone's life gets turned upside down for months" kind.
Unfortunately, there is often an implicit culture of denial: the database is "almost perfect", so the procedures for fixing the effects of imperfections are rarely fully thought through, and often far more time-consuming and error-prone than they should be.
FWIW, I was over-taxed by several hundred pounds after someone at a tax office mistyped my National Insurance number (for our US friends: like a SSN, but in the UK) by one character, and inadvertently merged me with someone on the far side of the country. The scary part wasn't so much that I lost some money for a while, but that the first time I knew about it was when my pay-cheque turned up short and I queried it with my employer's accountant; no-one thought to check with me that my status really had changed. Worse, it took three months chasing numerous tax officials and accountants in several offices to get it fixed, because they didn't believe I existed -- the linked computer records had automatically messed up all my identifying information and confused it with the other guy's.
If that could happen to me a couple of years ago, think what's going to happen when your whole life -- medical records, benefits payments, criminal record and "unofficial" black marks, etc. -- are all tied in to the uebersystem, and then that same human in that same office has to type the same hundreds of nine-digit codes perfectly every day.
/me smiles knowingly, notes that it is now almost 8pm here, and puts away his DVD box set of "24". :-)
Or the fans need to learn that pissing off your hardcore fans is not everything, depending on your point of view. Lucas is a businessman, and as far as I can see, a very good one.
Of course, it's your prerogative to dislike the man if you see fit, and to express your personal opinion of his work. However, whether it is someone's prerogative to run a satire on the original using part of the original work, which seems to be the case here, is another question.
I think that's the penalty if you dual-class at different levels. You probably get Fireball around level 11 PSU if you're still at level 2 Cooling System.
Sorry, where does anything say that? I missed it. Considering that Intel and co. seem to be moving away from a classical BIOS as fast as they can, and that the peripheral/component guys are hardly going to support a scheme that would reduce their sales, I don't see the credibility here.
Sure, but unless you really know what you're doing, the overall experience will still suck compared to a real STi, because you won't have the suspension, brakes, etc. to match the performance. It'll probably cost you a lot more than just buying an STi from a Subaru dealer, too. At the risk of over-soundbiting, the overall package is more than the sum of its parts, and the weakest link in the chain is what matters.
The same is true of PCs. How many people do you know who go out and try to make up their own system, choosing all the parts, put it together themselves, only to find the performance sucks compared to what they could have had out of the box, for 75% of the price, from any decent supplier, all because they didn't appreciate the need for {more RAM | faster CPU | higher-rated PSU | the right connectivity options | better monitor | etc}?
I think a simple scheme for Joe Average-Gamer is a great idea. Most people don't care, or want to care, about whether a 3200+ Athlon 64 is faster than a Pentium IV (or whatever they're up to now) 9.73THz. They want a PC that writes a letter, or browses the web, or can play Half-life 2 when it comes out. For these people, knowing that their system was up to "level 6" games would make life easier.
The tweakers will tweak, or build their own systems, as they always have, and I imagine game vendors will still publish recommended minimum spec and the reviewers will still tell you what you really need instead. Nothing about having a level system precludes all of that, and given the number of top-end gamers who like to tweak, do you really think the game manufacturers would stop them doing it?
For the record, I've been building my own systems since forever, I tend to buy top-end games a few months after they come out, and I drive a WRX. :-)
No, of course not, but no serious programming language does that. It does, however, take a roughly proportionate amount of time to write realistic code. I found around half a dozen comparative programming language studies whose data are consistent with this proposition (although that wasn't necessarily what they were testing) in about five minutes using Google, so if you care to learn something rather than making silly arguments the option is there for you.
And by the way, lines of code are a good metric for productivity in the right context. We aren't comparing programmers here, we're comparing the relative power of different languages based on the effectiveness of a diverse sample of programmers of each. Don't parrot, think.
There should be a new prize: Most Ironic Judges' Comment For The Year. I think this year's odds-on favourite would have to be:
:-)
Sure, and they all suck, as demonstrated by the fact that pretty much no serious UI code uses them. They are child's toys, and several decades after the invention of printf, you'd hope we knew better.
No, it doesn't, but then neither do the major problems with C++ I/O streams. That was kinda my point.
In a simple case, no. But one approach scales much, much better than the other, as exemplified in several code samples posted in this discussion. There's also the generic algorithm issue that is usually over-looked in this debate, which I've mentioned in other posts.
Well, since no other mainstream language is even close to being able to do what we do every day in C++ at work, I'll respectfully disagree on that one. As for Java, /me looks at discussion title, notes the question mark, and smiles.
You are never too old to enjoy fantasy, either. I live in Cambridge (as in the famous university) and it's safe to say that just about everybody I know here has read all the HP books, particularly all the students...
The secret, my dear fellow, is that on the two channels here in Blighty one can actually find something worthy of watching...
It's five now, by the way, if you exclude satellite, cable, etc.
While many of your points (for either side) have merit, I think it's important to remember that programming is a skill. It is not something just anyone can do, and doing it well requires a sufficient level of knowledge and ability. If you're working with people who Just Don't Get It(TM) so badly that they write misleading operator overloads, then you have far bigger problems than the presence of operator overloading in your language.
Languages can protect against careless errors: everyone knows you shouldn't dereference a NULL pointer, but in some languages, you have the option to do so by mistake. But languages cannot protect against a lack of understanding of how to use your tools, no matter how restrictive they may be.
How do you know what any function call you make is going to do in detail in a project that size?
The answer is: you don't.
But then again, you shouldn't need to. You trust that the function is going to do the job its interface says it will, and anything that doesn't is a bug. Of course, the same is true of any other function you call you make anywhere in high level code.