One of the good things to happen in emacs was the inclusion of `seq.el`. It makes easy functional operation over sequences, so no longer need `dash.el` or `cl-lib.el`. (dash still has many more functions inspired by clojure which is awesome when you need them)

But I still wish the emacs community could adopt a modern data structure library. It's difficult to consolidate usage of sequences (lists/vectors) with alists and plists. This would make it so much more accessible.

Thanks for the tip. I'd managed to miss the addition of these. I had somehow noticed the addition of the newer string- functions though, and immediately found them a huge improvement over the mishmash of randomly-named crap that was there before, so I expect seq- to be similarly transformative.

I immediately notice there's seq-filter, which can kill off one of my helper routines. And then (now I'm looking...) I've discovered this was always equivalent to cl-remove-if-not. But I never realised, because of the mystery meat naming conventions.

Still not sure why you chose C though? You could have chosen anything which meets all your requirements.

Many languages have markdown parsers in them, produce binaries, and are portable.

This is covered in the article.

Having read the article, I somehow know why they chose C.

C satisfies all their priorities, and there are not many, or even any other languages that do as well, and none actually better.

I'm from India and 5 of <insert your country here> devs can not replace me. Just kidding, I hope you understand that India is a huge country and you can find the entire spectrum of talent here.

Don't expect smart folks from India to work for $20 or even $50 an hour. You will get what you pay for.

My experience is that if you can pay 0.5 x <your salary> to an Indian developer I am sure you can find someone who can totally replace you.

Most of the times companies who want to "offshore to India" want to pay no more than 0.1 x <their local developer salary> and then cry when they can't deliver.

Indian tech companies are offering really competitive salaries nowadays. I have even started to see some Indian companies hire/outsource to Europe because it's cheaper.

This is exactly the case.

In my experience of looking for remote engineers, top talent costs the same pretty much everywhere and the great engineers in India (Russia, Poland,..) demand a pretty similar salary in USD when asked to perform the same tasks.

I think parent is under the impression that run of the mill engineers offshore SWEs can perform the same as a Googler.

I agree, but even great Indian software programmers are happy with much less. Getting half of what a similar American would get should make any talented dev extremely happy here.

I get around 1/3rd of what I would receive in the US, work with a globally distributed team, and I'm quite satisfied with my salary and the company quite satisfied with me.