The "unreadable" or "annoying" example from the article is only unreadable and annoying because the programmer was new to the project when he read the two offending lines of code.

I believe Stroustrup is correct that we're all beginners at some point, but we quickly move up. It makes more sense to optimize for "proficient, but not expert" than to optimize for "beginner," because more people are at the proficient level, and they stay there longer.

I agree that code shouldn't be unnecessarily complex. But I would quit any project that constantly brought up "but what if a programmer were brand new when they looked at this code?" in reviews. Then again, if other programmers have the same reaction, perhaps the project really would be full of nothing but beginners.

Why this dismissive comment? auto is definately overused in ways that are unreadable, exactly like the blog author says. Marking the type explicitely may be less generic in a way, but it helps readability so much by providing redundancy.

The author only gives two problematic usage examples, the first of which (ConjureMagic) nercury correctly addressed earlier as a symptom of poor OO design (related to the 'code to implementations' quote above).

The second issue (async) is quite similar in my opinion, and in practice your async handler will be explicitly decoupled and strongly typed at some point for reasons of testability so the example is describing also an OO design issue and not an issue with auto.

There may be real problems with auto but this article did not provide any compelling evidence of them.