The New C Standard

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.

Comments

Re:Thinly Veiled Job Request

[DenDave]

So maybe it is a guideline to hobby C coders, new learners, anyone who doesn't use C as professional??

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?

[mbessey]

Good grief. I can see why the publisher bailed on this. I wonder how much they would have had to charge for it?

-Mark

Re:Interesting outlook

[Kupek]

Computers don't comprehend code, they just run it. Comprehension is an entirely different act than execution. While we build up our comprehension one line (or word) at a time, we're still using our recollection of all previously related code to understand what this new piece of code does. And then, once we think we understand what's going on, I think we often mentally throw out the code itself, and just remember what it does.

Re:Why would you use this?

[Anonymous Coward]

C has a lot of shortcomings, like being only weakly-typed, etc.

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.

At over 1600 pages?!

[mariox19]

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!