The key power C macros had over any Template-type construct I've seen is that you can actually paste the name of the macro arguments to form unique variable names within the macro. So a single macro could expand to three or four different functions, a handful of variables, etc.

Yes, people are prone to hanging themselves by abusing macros, but you can do some wicked code simplification that expands inline to maximize performance. I had macros in my library of useful stuff that turned all the declarations and accessors of a "attribute and methods" into a single macro invocation. It was hard to debug them initially, but I used them for years afterwards without problems.

sh is not a programming language.

Amazon should put their cloud in a cloud, so the cloud will have the redundancy of the cloud.

But TV and movies have already taught us that all aliens speak English, so is it really that far fetched that they'd use the metric system too?