Patient: "Doctor Doctor, it hurts when I do this" Doctor: "Don't do that" This is arguing that there is a solution to manage a problem, and that because there

Patient: "Doctor Doctor, it hurts when I do this" Doctor: "Don't do that" This is arguing that there is a solution to manage a problem, and that because there are (caveated, external, third party) ways to manage it, there isn't a problem. Yes, there are ways to mitigate some of the problems of headers, but all the bookkeeping is part of the criticism. And there's still duplicate definitions in separate places to keep in sync, you end up having to move all your code into headers if you want to make things generic (with compile time repercussions), and it's easy to mismatch header versions with the libraries for the same file. Linking to the libX library for X.h is the least problematic of the header problems/criticisms.