[krypes]

You seem to have failed to grasp that the slides are arguing for RAII. While admittedly mildly trollish, it disparages java along with C#/ruby/python implicitly in favour of C++ only because C++ has the most 'correct' implementation of RAII.

There is no argument against try/catch/finally, the argument is that the most common usage of try blocks is for dealing with resource management, not actual exceptions in program state. Given exceptions should be used to expression 'exceptional' program states, that is a significant downside to code readability.

Syntactic sugar like using/yield/with blocks improve the signal to noise ratio of try block usage but still rely on programmer acceptance of that idiom. Ideally, the responsibility of cleanup would be moved entirely to the class implementation rather than the consumer. C++ did this with destructors. In a managed world where maybe you don't always want an eager dispose, rather than syntactic sugar in the caller, move it to the signature of the dispose. Something along the lines of

public scoped void Dispose() { .... }

Alternatively, @Scoped or <Scoped> if you don't want more keywords. The topic is partly to blame but RAII is orthogonal to whether a language is garbage collected or not. It's sad that in an age where PLs are undergoing a sort of renaissance period, mention of C++ causes everyone to circle their respective wagons.

[aidenn0]

And RAII in C++ relies on programmer acceptance of that idiom.

[fauigerzigerk]

Arguably it relies on the acceptance of fewer programmers, the library writers.