I have the feeling that the difference matters to almost nobody and should be avoidable by the few people it actually affects. I had more issues with colliding include guards than I had with symlinks and I still end up replacing CLASSNAME_H with PROJECT_CLASSNAME_H in our own headers every now and then since the autogenerated guards are too naive.
Include order is a valid complaint, the others truly are non issues.
I mean, we have other more pressing issues. Such as the fact that garbage collection is still a thing in 2018.
> ...but nowadays a proper documentation generator gives you better...
Examples of that?
> I like seeing function-level documentation alongside interface and implementation, but if I put the documentation in both the .cpp and the .h file it's duplicated in two places and easily gets out of date.
This is the only thing that I dislike about header files. And it is a constant reminder how bad IDEs are at handling this.
I hope he meant something else since he said "nowadays". Doxygen is ok if you haven't setup your build environment. But for when you actually are in the code (and somewhat familiar with it) I very much prefer just reading the header files than switching to a browser.
This happens because there is some redundancy between the header file and the source. You can often arrange your code so that there is no redundancy (or almost zero).
They're also bad as an overview. They may have been good in the 1980s, but nowadays a proper documentation generator gives you better formatting, search features, and cross-references. Inline documentation is particularly obnoxious in header files: I like seeing function-level documentation alongside interface and implementation, but if I put the documentation in both the .cpp and the .h file it's duplicated in two places and easily gets out of date.