[TUHS] Comments on "C"

[scj@yaccman.com (scj@yaccman.com)]

Before I headed off to my first summer job, my mother, who was working as
a programmer, gave me some good advice: "before you throw away a deck of
cards, put a rubber band around it...".   Saved my butt twice that
summer...

Incidentally, I figured the other day that a Petabyte of data, if punched
onto punched cards, would make a deck that was 6 times higher than the
distance to the moon...

Steve


> On Thu, 1 Sep 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:
>
>> Programming well requires a lot of thought and care and careful
>> rereading, and often throwing half the code out and re-doing it better,
>> and until we can have a programming community the majority of whom are
>> up to those challenges, we will continue to have crashes and security
>> vulnerabilities and other embarrassing bugs aplenty, no matter what
>> language is used.
>
> I think I saw that in CACM: "Prepare to throw out half your code, because
> you will anyway".
>
> Then there was the time I saw a Uni student, when, ambling down the
> corridor at UNSW Comp Sci, he tripped and spilled the entire deck of
> cards; after laughing for a while, I helped him to put them through the
> reader-sorter (fortunately, they were sequenced, I think).
>
> When I think back on some of the code I wrote, I still shudder...  Mind
> you, this was back in the days of the IBM-360 and the PDP-11, and I'd only
> just graduated, m'lud.
>
> --
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will
> suffer."
>