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Every language’s standard library has its weak spots. In C, for example, the stdio functions don’t have a consistent notion of where the FILE * belongs in the argument list. For fwrite, it goes at the end; for fseek, it’s at the beginning. This makes it harder to abstract away the details of the API. [...]

Here is an absolute treat: a long, lively interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, conducted on one of my favourite blogs, BLDGBLOG.
At its best (the Three Californias trilogy, Antarctica), Robinson’s writing is at once haunting and beautifully evocative of a sense of place.