[wyldfire]

I am one of the many stalwarts whose bookshelf contains a prominent copy of K&R C. But over the last 10 years or so I find myself referring to it less and less often. It's a huge problem that it stopped at the second edition. The 2nd ed was great in 1999. It is not great in 2016, it is only good.

> "You're right, but you're wrong that their code is bad." I cannot fathom how a group of people who are supposedly so intelligent and geared toward rational thought can hold in their head the idea that I can be wrong, and also right at the same time.

Zed, you're right, period. But I think you probably just hurt people's feelings because they revere Kernighan and Ritchie and this is one prominent item of their legacy.

> But C? C's dead. It's the language for old programmers who want to debate section A.6.2 paragraph 4 of the undefined behavior of pointers. Good riddance. I'm going to go learn Go (or Rust, or Swift, or anything else).

Amen. The union of those three are likely to address all use cases that C handled in the past.

BTW the blog post would be clearer if titled: " 'Deconstructing K&R C' is dead". Gotta love mixing up C with natural language operator precedence ambiguity. :)

[pcwalton]

The thing is, I think you can simultaneously have all of these opinions: (a) K&R were/are top-notch computer scientists; (b) K&R was a fantastically written book; (c) C was a great language in 1978; (d) we should be moving away from C in 2016. The fact that we didn't know as much about programming languages in 1978 as we do now in no way diminishes the significance of the work.

I think that C should rapidly be moving toward obsolescence, and I hold K&R in great esteem.

[wyldfire]

Agreed on all accounts.

[na85]

>Zed, you're right, period. But I think you probably just hurt people's feelings because they revere Kernighan and Ritchie and this is one prominent item of their legacy.

This is hilarious, because programmers by and large love to pride themselves about being stoic, logical, and practical in lieu of letting emotion dictate what they do.

Since when do programmers give a shit if people's precious fee-fees contradict what is technically correct? (The best kind of correct!)

[AlexeyBrin]

> Since when do programmers give a shit if people's precious fee-fees contradict what is technically correct?

Programmers at least the ones I've seen in my life are not from Vulcan :). In other words, we humans, are all driven by our emotions like it or not. The problem is that some people chose to believe that they are pure rational beings, therefore they are always right.

[ternaryoperator]

> Gotta love mixing up C with natural language operator precedence ambiguity. :)

Well, then, in that case you shouldn't you reall refer to it as K&&R