Strictly speaking, Lua is not global by default. All free names, that is, all names unqualified with `local`, is actually indexed from a table `_ENV`, which is set to `_G`, the global environment. So, all free names are effectively global by default, but you can change this behavior by put this line at the top of your file `local _G = _G; _ENV = {};`. This way, all free names are indexed from this new table, and all access to the global names must explicitly be accessed through `_G`, which is a local variable now. However, I have never seen such practice. Maybe it is just too complicated to accept that all free names are global variables and you have to explicitly make it local.
Thanks to Lua’s great metaprogramming facilities, and the fact that _G is just a table, another workaround is to add a metamethod to _G that throws an error if you try to declare a global. That way you can still declare globals using rawset if you really want them, but it prevents you from declaring them accidentally in a function body.
yeah. I hate typing `local` for every variable. I would prefer they introduce some syntactic sugar like `let`(to mean local variable) and `const`(to mean local and constant).
The link to the Amazon product looks like a non-affiliate link when you hover over it. But if you click, as soon as the mousedown event fires, they swap in an affiliate link. How rude!
Private equity seems to be a form of cancer that slowly sucks the life out of everything it touches, with a single goal: to grow and spread. Can someone more knowledgeable please explain to me why I'm wrong?
The reason it's easy to conclude that they're evil is because they are almost never committed to preserving or improving the quality of their investees. They are only committed to making money, and that often comes in the form of price gouging and liquidation.
PE strives to make things more efficient from a capital point of view. Business foois making $X in profit, and the PE firm's analysis says the can make X+Y dollars with some changes. This is 'better' because now the capital usage is more efficient and more can be spent in other places - new products, new jobs, new businesses, returns to investors, etc. And of course returns to the PE firm.
In principle an efficient economy is important on a macro scale - if all the business are stuck in how they were doing things 30 years ago then we would have reduced innovation and ultimately less jobs.
In practice there is of course a lot of money that flows back into the PE boss's pockets and.... thats it.
It trades robustness for efficiency. It makes the business/service altogether less robust, unable to withstand shocks, unable to survive the tests of time.
The classic playbook includes making a lot of debt, and then leaving the lenders holding the bag when the company files for bankruptcy. It can only be considered efficient if con artistry is efficient, that is, efficient at taking the money from the hands of people who trust other people "too much".
This is over simplistic and if everyone knew this is what happens when PE comes into play then no one would lend to PE-backed companies. Often times these debts can work out.
Very cool! Was it difficult to get Bitrig approved on the App Store? If I had to guess just based on the idea, it seems like the sort of thing Apple would take issue with.
Heh... it definitely wasn't an overnight approval. However, Apple has relaxed the guidelines for developer tools compared to the early days of the App Store. If you look today there are Python IDEs, Jupyter Notebooks, and various other apps that execute user generated code. The key guideline to be mindful of is 2.5.2.
