I'm sick of submissions about downvotes.

Please let's not start having this sort of comment here. It has the same flaws it attributes to the post, and is mean as well.

That's nothing. Look at the job I took:

lifetime exclusive contract, you can't work anywhere else, not even moonlighting

$0 salary and no equity (you’re supposed to be compensated in satisfaction)

no benefits other than being told that "everything here is a benefit"

no possibility of promotion or raise, ever

no job description: just do what you’re told

no office of your own, in fact, nothing of your own, ever again

all work ever done for any other employer must be forgotten forever; it's useless here

everything you do is wrong

everything the boss does is right

if you want to work on any personal projects, you have to make it appear that it's really for the boss

micromanaging boss complains about everything every 7 minutes

strict hours: 24/7, always on call

lovely seating, but only for company

the work is boring and demeaning, like taking out the garbage and cutting the grass

all your comfortable clothes get thrown away

you have to drive, even though the boss tells you where to go

you have to wear an employment symbol everywhere so that other prospective employers know you're already employed

you can only go to hacker news when the boss is out...oh wait, hold on, Hi Hon, you're home! I'm in here, on the internet, on diamonds.com...<alt-tab> (bye)

I've managed to keep from being incessantly downvoted in my unpopular opinions by providing well documented arguments (logos, with an occasional appeal to ethos of sources), tying to personal credibility or experience (ethos), or providing personal experience developing an empathic response, then tying into into the main argument. (pathos -> logos, or just pathos.)

The problem isn't disagreement - it's not developing ethos, pathos, or logos into the appropriate argument. The more controversial the opinion, the more that one must work to develop these three qualities, rather than depending on just one.

I also work to expose the weaknesses of my own argument, admit them, but explain why they are superior to the more conventional alternative.

I find that when this fails for myself, it's often because my perspective is lacking, and I need to rethink my argument.

On reddit, I'll still usually find an unpopular opinion at 3 or 4 points. There's likely some downmodding done, but most people will leave it alone if it's a proper argument.

(Some arguments, of course, are out of bounds. The emotional appeal is too strong. Abortion in a pro-life forum, for example. I haven't had that problem in most major forums.)

This is very rare - a title that has been way overused ("{x} mistakes {y} make") - but still very helpful and original. If you're hesitant that this is yet another worthless list of fluff, it isn't.

And lets not forget the physical and psychical terror from your colleagues. And the depression, apathy, and disgust with life. It was fun sometimes but between 7 and 15 years of age, i was pretty miserable in school, and i was bored because i knew everything and didn't find any challenges. But from the bright side i can now live my life with out fear of oppression because i know it and know that you shouldn't be afraid of it. The adult world is also full of bullies and its nice to know that you were trained the hard way for dealing with them.

That is pretty damn cool. Wish it had been an option in 1990 when my dad died.

Well, the short answer is that composing functions allows you to build algebraic abstractions but not syntactic abstractions.

I would never use squaring things as an example of macros: as you properly point out, this does not illustrate anything that cannot be done at least as easily with functions.

The examples I would trot out are things like let, which adds block scoping to languages that don't have it built in, or things like cond/case/switch. If you have a languge that doesn't have a case-like statement, you can use a macro to make one.

Your current language probably has these things built in, but such macors at least demonstrate a kind of abstraction that cannot be done with functions.

For example, you could build a function that looks like a case statement, but because most languages these days employ eager evaluation, your case function would evaluate all of its outcomes rather than only evaluating the one you want.

To make it work as a pure function, you would have to roll your own thunks by passing anonymous functions in for each case to be evaluated and each outcome. That works, but all that boilerplate becomes tedious.

The macro merely automates that kind of boilerplate for you in places where eager evaluation is harmful.

Time for me to stop, but I'll leave with a suggestion: syntactic abstraction is most useful when there's something unusual about the way you want to evaluate things.

" I've always wondered why he doesn't get the same recognition as Plato or Aristotle, or even Socrates."

His name is hard to pronounce :-)