Being good is one thing, being compatible with existing files full of VBA macros is another.

Although MS themselves apparently don't realize that, considering how they push the web version which doesn't support them?

Oh, the web version doesn't support them? I hadn't realized that.

It doesn't even support many basic functions of the office apps.

MS was working hard on creating feature parity but at some point they just dropped everything and gave up.

It's great to hear you've already tried X twice. But have you tried reading our FAQ section on X? Also, try using this setting that doesn't exist or this dialog that was removed in 2022

Depends. If it takes an assembly programmer 8 hours to implement <X>, can an equally proficient Python programmer spending 8 hours to implement <X> create a faster program?

Let's say they only need 2 hours to get the <X> to work, and can use the remaining 6 hours for optimizing. Can 6 hours of optimizing a Python program make it faster than the assembly program?

The answer isn't obvious, and certainly depends on the specific <X>. I can imagine various <X> where even unlimited time spent optimizing Python code won't produce faster results than the assembly code, unless you drop into C/C++/Zig/Rust/D and write a native Python extension (and of course, at that point you're not comparing against Python, but that native language).

http://shader-slang.org/ agrees

If LLMs were like compilers, you could put src/ into .gitignore and only upload the prompt.

Even the earliest compilers didn't work by the programmer writing code, copying the assembly output into their source tree, and throwing away the code.

This is not a value judgement, they simply aren't the same thing at all.

here you go, a prompt only library: https://github.com/dbreunig/whenwords

That's great. Here's "me" implementing a JS version of that library in one shot using Github Copilot and a 1 sentence prompt:

> Implement when.js as a simple, zero-dependency js library following SPEC.md exactly.

https://github.com/jncraton/whenwords/pulls

> While governments pretend to do stuff for the environment,

Not the one that put out that statement

That's really not the point they were making.

You are much more likely to be repressed/harrassed/arrested by your local government than a foreign government. So a local government knowing your behavior is more likely to lead to bad consequences than a foreign government knowing.

Of course, that might change in the future. Hypothetical example, the US government bans you from using any US cloud services because of what you did in private.

Though that's not exactly exclusive to governments either, Google banning you from GMail and Google Docs because of your YouTube uploads is already a thing.

That's definitely true. Can't have generics / compile time evaluation across languages. Need to design your code around that restriction ahead of time. SQLite being dynamically typed luckily doesn't have any problems with that.

I've actually run into a similar problem with a C library before, because it heavily used macros as part of its API. Glad most developers don't do that.

You can still use them inside your code, just not as arguments or return values from the API.

And it's not like that's a point in favor of C, since C doesn't have vector or unique_ptr either

Yeah, it's not a very convincing argument imho. You can write C libraries in C++ or Rust or D or Zig, and people do it all the time.

In fact, some popular C++ libraries don't even have a stable C++ API, only a C API. LLVM comes to mind. DuckDB is another example