Rick's b.log - 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:

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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".

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