You can have name collisions of functions with the same name, same namespace and same signature. But you can have nested namespaces, so namespaces are still the

You can have name collisions of functions with the same name, same namespace and same signature. But you can have nested namespaces, so namespaces are still the answer in c++. In languages where those are not available or where you are forced to use classes anyways (e.g., java) I see no problem with classes-as-a-namespace, but especially in java there is no point in discussing "classes that should be free functions", too, as those don't exist.