I was referring to the macro preprocessor. C is a great language (although it is primitive by modern standards). The preprocessor is a separate and distinct language, not so good.
I have seen endless incomprehensible preprocessor crap. People have even used it for metaprogramming.
I used to use it for metaprogramming, too. One day, I decided to rip it all out and use the preprocessor as little as possible. The result was much better.
Analogous to C are the macro processors for assemblers. A friend of mine who worked at Microsoft told me about an assembler program that was about 50k. The person who wrote it had left the company. There was a bug in the program, and the manager assigned it to programmer after programmer, and they'd all give up on it after a couple weeks. So my friend said he'd fix it, and fixed it in a couple hours and checked it in.
The manager was surprised. He asked how my friend managed it. My friend said that the code was all macros to create a magical special undocumented half-assed language that nobody could understand. So he ran the object file through a disassembler (mine) to generate source code. Then the bug was obvious, he fixed it, and checked in the disassembly as the new source.
I've also heard complaints from Scala programmers about the overuse of macros making for incomprehensible code.
Common Lisp is not a functional language. You can write functional-paradigm code in CL but it will happily let you write old-school imperative style, OOP, etc.
The de facto open source implementation, SBCL, has a solid compiler and garbage collector. It produces fast code.
SBCL can produce very fast code. It's really slept on from that point of view.
A couple of years back there was a paper doing the rounds about software execution efficiency, which a lot of people in my neck of the woods got interested by because of the potential for environmental impact at the sort of scale we operate at. SBCL ranked disturbingly highly for something that is culturally never going to happen for us.
The entire purpose of traction control is to reduce the driver skill required when cornering and braking. This is why traction control is omnipresent in consumer vehicles, because the vast majority of road drivers are awful.
FIA bans traction control so as to place more emphasis on driver skill.
It’s a perversion of the truth which is that officers or directors of a corporation have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to act in the interests of those shareholders and not to eg enrich themselves.
But that doesn’t mean the duty is to maximize next quarter’s profit. Long term sustainability is also broadly in the interests of shareholders. The duty likewise does not require one to throw ethics and morals out the window.
This is why shareholders elect the board of directors, in theory.
In theory, companies can act in any way they choose as long as the owners approve (there's some supreme court ruling on that), and executives have a high degree of latitude in how they interpret "for profit" (basically there has to be a vaguely defensible rationale) but failing that, they must act to the benefit of the company. And the easiest way to do that without a risk of being sued is to make the line go up.
(And even ignoring that, the executives often have personal motivations that have the same effect, and may just point at the "legal" angle as ass covering)
> I wonder if the author also agrees with DHH’s racist opinions.
Suppose you hold viewpoint A, and so does DHH. Suppose further you have no idea who DHH is. I, for example, had never heard of him before 2024.
Suppose now that you discover DHH also has racist opinions.
By the sentiment you express in your comment, logic demands that you now change your preexisting viewpoint A because it’s now shared with a racist. Is that what you’re advocating?
Most of the tech unicorns are like this. Zuckerberg caught lightning in a bottle one single time and everything they’ve tried since has sucked. Instagram was an acquisition. So were oculus and WhatsApp. By contrast their next in-house flagship was temu Wii avatars.
Amazon hasn’t built anything innovative since the Kindle.
Surely it’s a consequence of being publicly traded that these companies cease to be able to develop good novel products rather than acquire competitors or iterate on past successes.
Why would it be a consequence of being publicly traded? Apple has less concentrated ownership than Facebook or Google and has been far better at developing novel products.
>[…]The same thing happens in other languages with macros (like C and assembler).
Uh, C definitely caught on.