The submitted title is missing the salient keyword "finally" that motivates the blog post. The actual subtitle Raymond Chen wrote is: "C++ says “We have try…finally at home.”"

It's a snowclone based on the meme, "Mom, can we get <X>? No, we have <X> at home." : https://www.google.com/search?q=%22we+have+x+at+home%22+meme

In other words, Raymond is saying... "We already have Java feature of 'finally' at home in the C++ refrigerator and it's called 'destructor'"

To continue the meme analogy, the kid's idea of <X> doesn't match mom's idea of <X> and disagrees that they're equivalent. E.g. "Mom, can we order pizza? No, we have leftover casserole in the fridge."

So some kids would complain that C++ destructors RAII philosophy require creating a whole "class X{public:~X()}" which is sometimes inconvenient so it doesn't exactly equal "finally".

▲ thombles 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

HN has some heuristics to reduce hyperbole in submissions which occasionally backfire amusingly.

▲ mort96 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah it's a huge mistake IMO. I see it fucking up titles so frequently, and it flies in the face of the "do not editorialise titles" rule:

    [...] please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

It is much worse, I think, to regularly drastically change the meaning of a title automatically until a moderator happens to notice to change it back, than to allow the occasional somewhat exaggerated original post title.

As it stands, the HN title suggests that Raymond thinks the C++ 'try' keyword is a poor imitation of some other language's 'try'. In reality, the post is about a way to mimic Java's 'finally' in C++, which the original title clearly (if humorously) encapsulates. Raymond's words have been misrepresented here for over 4 hours at this point. I do not understand how this is an acceptable trade-off.

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mcny 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Personally, I would rather we have a lower bar for killing submissions quickly with maybe five or ten flags and less automated editorializing of titles.

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rramadass an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You can always contact hn@ycombinator.com to point out errors of this nature and have it corrected by one of the mods.

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mort96 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It has been up with the incorrect title for over 7 hours now. That's most of the Hacker News front-page lifecycle. The system for correcting bad automatic editorialisation clearly isn't working well enough.

	▲	rramadass 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, come on man! These are trivial bugs. Whoever noticed it first should have sent the email to the mods. I did it before i posted my previous comment and i now see that the title has been changed appropriately.

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UncleMeat an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

A better approach would be to not so aggressively modify headlines.

Relying on somebody to detect the error, email the mods (significant friction), and then hope the mods act (after discussion has already been skewed) is not really a great solution.

▲ tux3 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's rare to see the mangling heuristics improve a title these days. There was a specific type of clickbait title that was overused at the time, so a rule was created. And now that the original problem has passed, we're stuck with it.

▲ pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You have a few minutes to change the title after the submission, I do it all the time.

▲ vidarh 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm curious about the actual origin now, given that a quick search shows only vague references or claim it is recent, but this meme is present in Eddie Murphys "Raw" from 1987, so it is at least that old.

▲ locknitpicker 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> So some kids would complain that C++ destructors RAII philosophy require creating a whole "class X{public:~X()}" which is sometimes inconvenient so it doesn't exactly equal "finally".

Those figurative kids would be stuck in a mental model where they try to shoehorn their ${LanguageA} idioms onto applications written in ${LanguageB}. As the article says, C++ has destructors since the "C with Classes" days. Complaining that you might need to write a class is specious reasoning because if you have a resource worth managing, you already use RAII to manage it. And RAII is one of the most fundamental and defining features of C++.

It all boils down to whether one knows what they are doing, or even bothers to know what they are doing.