The Original K&R – Still a Classic!
If you look closely you’ll notice that the favorites icon for Code Trials is a faded blue “C”. This is taken from, the seminal book on programming, the first edition K&R, or more fully titled: The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie.
Of all the books on programming I’ve read, this is by far and away the one that had the biggest impact on me. I programmed in “C” for a close to twenty years. I think “C” is a beautiful language. Sadly I have not written much “C” in the last ten years, and when I do I’m rusty.
After the dot.com crash, I wanted to switch to an interpreted language for web development and back in 2000 with so much experience in “C” the only real option for me was Perl. Perl is a fun language for sure and thanks to its incredible selection of libraries there is pretty much nothing you can’t do in Perl.
However, Perl is not a beautiful language. Don’t get me wrong, I like programming in Perl and have written some of my “best” code using it. But it does not have the beauty or elegance of “C”. In the new year I will embark on the creation of a new platform that will permit Digital Cheetah to build 1000’s more custom websites for a fraction of the development required with traditional systems. For this project I will not use “C”, or Perl or Ruby or Java. I will use, what to me is rapidly becoming the perfect language, Python.
Over the coming weeks and months I will revisit why I love Python so much.