- entry 2020/12/01

Advent Calendar 2020 day 1

Though, I can imagine, this is probably not a year many would want to remember.

It'll be written about in the history books as follows:

  2020
    Shit.
    (everything went wrong)

So, without any further ado, let's get straight to the video:

Your comments:

Please note that while I check this page every so often, I am not able to control what users write; therefore I disclaim all liability for unpleasant and/or infringing and/or defamatory material. Undesired content will be removed as soon as it is noticed. By leaving a comment, you agree not to post material that is illegal or in bad taste, and you should be aware that the time and your IP address are both recorded, should it be necessary to find out who you are. Oh, and don't bother trying to inline HTML. I'm not that stupid! ☺ ADDING COMMENTS DOES NOT WORK IF READING TRANSLATED VERSIONS.
 
You can now follow comment additions with the comment RSS feed. This is distinct from the b.log RSS feed, so you can subscribe to one or both as you wish.

Gavin Wraith, 1st December 2020, 21:41

Snap! It was a Lindt ball for me too. Happy Advent.    A weighty looking book from SAMS. In the 80s I used to be inundated with free textbooks from American publishers (wanting me to recommend them to my lecture-series audience), which weighed a ton. It was explained by the fact that American students had cars, but UK students only had bicycles (and the UK textbooks were admirably slim, at least by comparison). I have three books on C: the classic text, the C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie, The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike, and The C Book by Banahan whose introduction makes the oft-repeated observation that C is a bit like a cross-bred terrier: inelegant in places, but a tenacious brute that the family is fond of.

David Pilling, 3rd December 2020, 13:47

Computer books where a phenomenon - go in the Uni. bookshop more space for computer books than any other subject. Years later PC World computer shop, again loads of books. Not sure if it is over now - long time since I bought a computer book, I just look stuff up online. Yet there is a yearning, I will buy a book and it will explain everything and I will understand. Alas I have books multiple inches thick on my desk and I never understood.  Maybe it is like that old thing "I did not have time to write a short message so I wrote a long one". Easier to produce 2 inches of copy and paste from the MicroSoft documentation than to distil the meaning into a short book like K&R.  I have a number of 2 inch thick doorstops which can be summarised as "don't bother it will be obsolete by the time you read this".

Rick, 28th December 2020, 22:19

The problem with doing anything with K&R these days is that it is a very old dialect of C with a few things that have rightfully been fixed (the K&R function definition was a mess). It's different to the point that while most compilers will accept it, you need to set an option to say "I'm using prehistoric C here".

Add a comment (v0.11) [help?] . . . try the comment feed!
		Your name
		Your email	(optional)
		Validation	Are you real? Please type 14850 backwards.
		Your comment