> "Just changing the name alone under the Executive Order doesn't affect DOGE's recordkeeping status,” Jason R. Baron, professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration told 404 Media in a phone call. “The administration apparently has made a determination that DOGE will be a presidential component subject to the Presidential Records Act. However, that will surely be challenged in the courts in connection with FOIA lawsuits. Under FOIA, it will be for the courts to decide whether under existing DOGE is acting more like a federal oversight agency or as a presidential component that solely advises the President.”
The article is fairly sloppy and uses lots of scare-quotes, but basically it's saying that communications for the DOGE team will report in to the Chief of Staff making them subject to the Presidential Records Act instead of the general reporting conditions for the OMB.
The article also states that 'DOGE is gutting...' when that's not true. They're advising the President, and the President is cleaning house. They investigate, recommend, the President decides, and those decisions get acted on. This is how a task force like this is supposed to work.
"The President decides..." within the limits of his constitutional powers. Which do not include, for example, impoundment or unilaterally shutting down agencies authorized by Congressional acts.
Judge John McConnell disagrees with you. His decision placing a hold on the spending freeze cites the Impoundment Control Act as part of his finding that the lawsuit is likely to succeed on the merits.
That decision applies to a very specific item: congressional appropriated federal support to states. Which is probably the strongest case for an impoundment argument.
Yep. And certainly at the beginning of all this there was reason to think that this was happening. For example, Solar for All grants were paused with no explanation of why or the expected path for releasing them.
To be fair, he's a district chief judge and I've certainly disagreed with some of them in the past. But at least it demonstrates that the question of impoundment is on the table.
Virtually all of the spending through USAID was Congressionally authorized. Can you explain how blocking or delaying that spending fails to meet the definition of Impoundment?
To say nothing the freezes that have been put on hold by the courts.
If you think there’s a violation of the impoundment act, you need to identify what the “program” is and why you think the administration won’t spend the whole program amount within the relevant time period.
Exactly. I made this comparison elsewhere, but it still fits. They are akin to the US Chemical safety board. They have investigative powers, but that's it. They can't actually change anything, just issue recommendations.
Now, USCSB makes some incredible YouTube videos, I somehow doubt Doge will do the same
> They're advising the President, and the President is cleaning house.
That may be a distinction without a difference. The reason to have advisors around is so you can rely on them to make a proposal you can sign off on, because they understand your overall vision. If they're not proposing cuts he agrees with, he'll replace DOGE leadership until he finds people who do.
Lisp is dynamically typed and macros are syntactic. The macro gets in an AST and spits out an AST with little in the way of semantic information involved beyond maybe some identifier resolution.
Dart is a statically typed language and we wanted macros to be able to introspect over the semantics of the code the macro is applied to, not just the semantics. For example, if a macro is generating code for serialization, we wanted the macro to be able to ask "Does the type of this field implement JsonSerializable?". Answering that means being able to look up the type of the field, possibly walk its inheritance hierarchy, etc.
It's a very different problem from just "give me a way to add pretty loop syntax".
This is just my opinion but I believe it's because the syntax tree is the syntax. In a Lisp macro you are working with lists, just like you are for any other Lisp code. Almost every other language I've used (I've been programming since the late 1980s) has, at best, a special data structure to manipulate ASTs. So it ends up being quite unnatural. Lisp macros are just Lisp.
> This is just my opinion but I believe it's because the syntax tree is the syntax.
This holds for "old" lisps. There are other options. Racket and Scheme uses "syntax objects". Syntax objects contain besides the old syntax tree also source location information and lexical information.
Are Lisp macros easy to use? My understanding was that Lisp code is notoriously difficult to understand if you didn't write it, largely because of the obscenely powerful macro system that makes it too easy to be too clever. Which is essentially the same complaint that everyone has about every macro system.
It’s possible to do that, but in practice it’s quite uncommon. Especially since Lisps offer great tools for programmers to learn what the macros that the are using actually do.
in Scheme you can redefine `define` to be number 5. Easy to implement, but a nightmare in real world scenarios [0]. That's why languages like Go became popular, they're trashy, boring, and dumb, but that's exactly what's needed in big projects.
[0]: imagine your colleague wrote a macro that redefines for loops because at the time, it made life easier for him.
> in Scheme you can redefine `define` to be number 5.
This is like asking "what if your coworker named all errs as `ok`" so everything was `if ok { return errors.New("Not ok!!"); }`. It's possible but no one does it.
This is why `defmacro` and `gensym` in common lisp are awesome, and similarly why Go's warts don't matter. Much of programming language ugliness is an "impact x frequency" calculation, rather than one or the other.
It's also why javascript is so terrible, you run into it's warts constantly all day long.
"No one does it" is extremely relative. Take your closing remark about JavaScript: I don't run into JS warts very often at all, and I'm a professional web developer who works in it day in and day out. I guess my team just doesn't do dumb JS stuff?
But apparently lots of other people do run into them regularly, so I believe that such things do exist.
By the same token, I've heard countless reports of people struggling with the flexibility that Lisp offers, with co-workers who abuse it to create nightmarish situations. That you haven't experienced that doesn't mean no one does.
I don't mean "do dumb stuff", I mean I've literally never seen anyone redefine the `define` keyword in any code.
With javascript, I do see people use `===` frequently. It's a wart of the language that the operator even exist. It's not "dumb" to use it - it's how frequently are you assaulted with the bugs of the language (not bugs in your code).
You might have been misled by a CS professor's enthusiasm about what they thought was neat, or was a good way to communicate something.
But I don't recall seeing someone re-define `define` in real life.
Nor do I recall seeing any problematic redefinitions in Scheme in real life.
That said, if you wanted to make a language variant in which `define` did something different than normal (say, for instrumentation, or for different semantics for variable syntax), then you'd probably use Racket, and you'd probably define your own `#lang`, so that the first line of files using your language would be something like `#lang myfunkylang`.
You can randomly sample code in <https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/>, and look for people doing anything other than `#lang racket/base` or `#lang typed/racket/base`.
I think I will take another look. I recently helped my grandson with his university C++ assignment. It was a lot better than I remember C++ in the 90s.
Fun wise though, I get the most fun with dynamic languages that are highly interactive like Forth, Common Lisp and Smalltalk. I don’t have to drop out of the zone to kick the compiler all the time.
