"Forget these silly runtime errors you had in Ruby: C++ is statically-typed!" Levap, a seasoned engineer, was enlightening the new hire. "You no longer have to wait while the sample run or unit tests finish to learn that your variables have the wrong type, nor you have to worry about this happening in production".

So, Paul, the younger engineer, stopped worrying. He went back to implementing a subclass that, unlike its parent, would only perform a low-level blocking write of data stored in a buffer object instead of more complex writing semantics found in the parent:

The new Write function would assert that the second parameter was false, and would just call a regular system's write, familiar to any C programmer. The only exception was that it fetched the target from the SimpleWriter object's private variables, and it wrote data chunk-by-chunk until finished. Hence, it didn't have to return the number of bytes written, and threw a fatal error on a severe error.

The yonger engineer soon found out that creating NeverBlockingWriter in place of SimpleWriter only required modifying method, and should involve no data copying. In a dynamic language, he would do just that by replacing the SimpleWrite method of the object with a nonblocking-only version, but in C++, Paul had to instantiate a whole new class and copy the information from the parent one to it. An alternative could be to force the superclass to be friends with its own child, which sounded more suitable for a dumb scene in a sitcom. Oh, if he only had the powers of Ruby...

Paul first merely called the parent's SimpleWrite(buffer, block), but then decided that calling SystemWrite directly was clearer and faster, so he fixed the code shortly afterwards:

This code looked right, but didn't work. What was worse, Paul planned to get the code working on the last hour before Christmas, and he couldn't, which created a sense of incompleteness and incompetence for the whole holiday.

What happened was that Paul updated the name of function to call, but forgot to update its arguments. Normally, C++ would barf a compile error in an instant. In this case, however, the trap was perfect: C++ silently, without a single warning, cast the pointer to Buffer to pointer to void, and boolean true to one. The program expected the other endpoint to reply to the data written, so the lack of the complete write created a very weird bug. Apparently, these functions were not different enough for C++ to show a compile error.

The fixed version immediately demonstrated that everything else was OK:

"Statically typed, my ass," were Paul's next words. Nobody heard him, since he stayed later to fight this bug.

Paul saved the code, and finally left the office. On his train, he shed a tear for OCaml that distinguished between integer and boolean, and promised that next time he saw a weird bug, he would check if he fell into another loophole in C++'s "static" typing.

"Lol, just pay more attention next time, smartass," the seasoned engineer advised.

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