I don't think his argument is very convincing, because it focuses on only one aspect of namespaces: how many characters do I have to type? Old-style programmer

I don't think his argument is very convincing, because it focuses on only one aspect of namespaces: how many characters do I have to type? Old-style programmers who came of age in the 70's and 80's were absolutely obsessed with keeping the number of characters typed as low as possible. There was a reason for this: the keyboards in those days were terrible. I typed my Master's thesis and my PhD dissertation on VT100 terminal keyboards that had a throw of about 1 cm and required a few hundred newtons to get the damned keys to move at all, much less make a clean contact at the switch. It was more like punching a speed-bag for your fingers than typing on a modern keyboard. But reducing the number of characters typed is not the only reason for having namespaces, nor is it the most important one. When you add a feature to a language you are saying to the users, "The people who designed this language felt that this feature was important enough to implement so we think it is worth your time to use it." That kind of moral persuasion is not to be under-estimated. In the case of namespaces, having the feature encourages developers working in that language to think more carefully about how to modularize their code. This argument may also not be enough to justify the complexity, but when evaluating such things there should be some attempt to cover all the arguments for and against, not just pull out the one you happened to find persuasive.