The New C Standard 400
derek_farn writes "At a very late stage Addison Wesley decided not to publish my book, 'The New C Standard: An economic and cultural commentary'. Now that the copyright issues have been sorted out I am making the pdf freely available. You can download the pdf (mirror 1). The organization is rather unusual in that the commentary covers each sentence of the C Standard (actually the latest draft of C0X, excluding library) one by one (all 2022 of them). One major new angle is using the results from studies in cognitive psychology to try and figure out how developers comprehend code. The aim being to try and produce some coding guidelines that reduce costs (ie, reduce the time needed and bugs created). The book also contains the results of lots of measurements (over 400 figures and
tables) in an attempt to back the arguments being made -- another unusual feature since most software related books don't publish any figures to back up what they say. Other subsections discuss common implementations and differences between the latest draft standard and C90/C++. More background on the project is available from the Inquirer.
Why not self publish? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thinly Veiled Job Request (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there is a target audience, perhaps you don't fall in the category but that doesn't mean that everyone who dabbles with C is Uber-Geek..
One Thousand Sixteen Pages? (Score:5, Insightful)
-Mark
"The New" (Score:4, Insightful)
What about when the next version of C comes out?
You'll have to go back a revise the title! Why not do it right the first time and call it "C90/C++ Style" or something.
Maybe times when cleaning up other people's files I have run into files with "new" in the name... dated years ago. A sure sign it can be deleted.
Re:Interesting outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thinly Veiled Job Request (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not an estheticist... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Thinly Veiled Job Request (Score:2, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I got the PDF about a month ago and have just skimmed through it once.
Nice to have on the bookshelf...for a few of us (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, choosing to make deep commentary on the suitability of a computer language as a tool for solving problems but then going light on the dominant OO languages is just too big an omission. e.g. on pg 24: Since we all mostly program in OO paradigms these days, the author's perspectives on C++, though they would lengthen an already long book, should have been prominently featured instead of downplayed.
shoulda used booksurge (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Again...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cool but to what point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why would you use this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe somebody should write a book once about why people should switch away from C to more modern languages.
You may view such things as shortcomings. I view them as power. Power that can be used for good or for ill.
Modern languages are all about protecting the programmer from having power. They limit the programmer, tying him or her down. This was done because so many programmers are idiots, true, but never forget that the problems modern languages were meant to solve are all people problems, not computer problems.
It is people that seem to need object oriented structures, because the language needs to help protect the programmers from their failure to organize data structures in a sensible way and communicate that structure to other programmers. People that seem to require strongly-typed languages, to prevent their errors of inattention while they write code. But all these features are unknown to the CPU -- they've all been stripped away in the compiler, and reduced back to the purity of sequential code. A purity that most programmers can't handle. A purity that C comes closest to (besides assembly, of course).
As a programmer working professionally for nearly 20 years now, I find it unutterably sad that so many new programmers are let out of colleges having so little idea of how computers actually operate. They're not programmers anymore -- they're a priesthood who poke at the black boxes in certain ways and the boxes "magically" do what they're supposed to. They have as little idea of what's going on as a 5-year-old playing with a gyroscope (and I apologize to any really bright 5-year-olds out there for the comparison).
The reduction of the use of C in our profession marks the decline of real knowledge in the average programmer.
Re:Why would you use this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Using java does not automagically give you all of these benefits. In the hands of a competent programmer, they may be easier to acheive with java. However, in the hands of an incompetent programmer, the best you might get would be portability and mobility. That is, as long as you stick with virtual machines and class libraries from one vendor.
There is no silver bullet.
At over 1600 pages?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not counting the citations at the end, the book is 1,577 pages of "guidelines." Who's got that kind of time for a hobby? Who, having a job as a programmer, even has the time to read a book like that?
How about somebody writing a book called The New Writing Standard for Books on Programming? Most of the programming books I own are unecessarily long winded, but this book takes the cake!
Some thoughts (Score:4, Insightful)
The aim for C should not simply be to reduce the time spent on code, the simplistic economic view. Leave that to Java. C is for a clear and thorough understanding of the code's execution, more so than C++. The execution flow can very clearly be seen in this structured language which does not try to be smart or do things behind the wall in the compiler. C is brutal and raw, therefore low level and powerful. Leave it to that. C is great for kernel level programming, drivers and embedded systems, and other places where you get anal about control over whats happening. C is awesome when you need to mingle the code with assembly in tight spots and still keep things readable.
Please do not turn it into Java. Programmers who need to spend less time can just use Visual Basic or equivalents.
I like the idea of commenting on all parts of the standard. But you said you used a cognitive analysis of some sort. More so than that, I'd look for comments from experienced developers, maybe people who worked on various kernels and drivers, integrated various languages with C, developed C libraries and worked on a hundered-file projects.
Re:Again...? (Score:3, Insightful)
in php its no big deal to make sure that anything you stuff in a db is safe - just do an $valueToStore = htmlentities($valueFromPoster). So either do the same in perl, or convert to php.
Re:Manifestation of liturgical commentary. (Score:2, Insightful)
The silver bullet is competence (Score:2, Insightful)
The common thread, as I read it:
It sounds to me like the silver bullet is competence, which is acquired through a combination of aptitude, training, and experience. Silver bullet methodologies attempt to negate the importance of aptitude by relating experience into best practices for training. Silver bullet languages attempt to negate the importance of aptitude by making the languages more robust against stupidity. Yet, in the hands of the inept, silver bullets invariably embed themselves in the nearest available foot.
Some people just don't get it, whatever "it" is.
Re:Why would you use this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you honestly believe that any of what you just said hasn't occurred to the original poster? A veteran of almost 20 years?
This discourse is so tired and worn-out that its only purpose is to serve as joke fodder on the Internet. And this is how it's been for ages, all the way back to when the first "Real Programmers don't eat quiche" jokes were being forwarded across Bitnet.Functional programming, structured programming, logical programming, constraints programming, p-code systems, object oriented programming, iterative development, patterns, open source development, pair programming, Extreme programming, managed code: each of these was heralded as the sine qua non of software development at its inception, only to get bogged down in messy detail once people actually started to build real-world systems with them. Bits and pieces survive here and there and percolate up in newer languages and designs, until every hint of the original glamour has vanished and they become just another fixture for pigeons to shit on.
And this is how progress is made, slowly and erratically, like a blind man groping about in the dark.
Fred Brooks was right: there is no silver bullet.
Re:Author comments (Score:2, Insightful)
Why can't you just say "paper version"? It's called PAPER. Get with the times.
Re:At over 1600 pages?! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's no wonder they didn't publish it, it's impenetrable. Not worthless, but just too detailed. It needs some completely different organization to carry the quantity of information it has.
My guess is, he set it all down and they probably asked him to reorganize it, and he balked, and instead offered what he had up in PDF form to us. Editors really do a valuable service, one that's missing from what you'll see here.
Only Slashdotters would complain about free books (Score:1, Insightful)
It reads well, it's a useful book, and the shorter pages make it appear uncluttered.
I'm just amazed - a guy puts this much time and attention into what looks to be a useful book, and GIVES IT AWAY FREE, then all anyone on Slashdot does is moan and whine.
Typical.
Re:Why would you use this? (Score:3, Insightful)
NuclearBomb inherits Bomb
AtomBomb inherits NuclearBomb
HydrogenBomb inherits NuclearBomb
Bomb littleBoy = new AtomBomb();
Now littleBoy is declared as a reference to any kind of bomb. You are then assigning specifically an AtomBomb to it.
Adding all sorts of language shortcuts because you don't want programmers to type as much is inelegant. It makes the language harder to learn and read. Part of the elegance of Java is the eschewing of fancy syntactic candy-coated shortcuts in favor of a regular, predictable syntax.
-If
Re:One Thousand Sixteen Pages? (Score:1, Insightful)
Allah yehfazum wa yitawil umrom!
(May God keep them and lengthen their lives)
Say amen.
Re:Why would you use this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Modern languages are all about protecting the programmer from having power. They limit the programmer, tying him or her down. This was done because so many programmers are idiots, true, but never forget that the problems modern languages were meant to solve are all people problems, not computer problems.
No, it was done because most programmers are people, and most people aren't 100% perfect robots that get everything right all the time. Have you never suffered from out out of bounds error in an array? Just specifying checks for this in a langauge -helps- you, not hinder you. The amount of work you don't have to do chasing down problems that pop up a long way away from the source of the problem is amazingly less, when the program tells you where it (you!) went wrong.
Languages that protect you don't have to be seen as the enemy.