Losing control of a project is likely more due to the programmers on it than the tools they use. IMHO _anything_ done consistently can be reasoned about and if necessary undone.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the rot goes so deep that there is really no way out.
And the C pre-processor has figured prominently in more than one such case in my career. And it was precisely in the kind of way that is described in TFA.
For something to be doable it needs to make economic sense as well and that's the problem with nightmare trickery like this. Initially it seems like a shortcut, but in the long run the price tag keeps going up.
Best guess is that your analysis is missing some detail. People not tools write programs. Also any serious discussion here ends up in politics. If you design your software so that the programmers are fungible then the software suffers regardless of your choices.
Just to double down here I took a code base written in this style (not exactly atw but inspired by him) and spent about a day expanding it to this point: https://codeberg.org/growler/k/src/branch/expand/a.c
My guess is it would only take a week to get it to what people here are calling “acceptable”.
jacquesm|3 months ago
And the C pre-processor has figured prominently in more than one such case in my career. And it was precisely in the kind of way that is described in TFA.
For something to be doable it needs to make economic sense as well and that's the problem with nightmare trickery like this. Initially it seems like a shortcut, but in the long run the price tag keeps going up.
gitonthescene|3 months ago
gitonthescene|3 months ago