LocalMan

That's what oncologists do. You aren't going to learn oncology in a week.

So don't find a treatment, find the best cancer treatment center you can get the patient admitted to.

A much more complete book than K&R is "C: A Reference Manual", which has much better explanations.

See it here: http://careferencemanual.com/, at its home page.

Or at Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Reference-Manual-5th-Edition/dp/013089....

Turn to this book when you have questions. The authors are Harbison and Steele. If you become a C programmer, you will want and need this book. So you may as well get a copy now.

Another (more advanced) book is The C Puzzle Book.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Puzzle-Book-Alan-Feuer/dp/02016046....

It's older and I'm not sure it's totally up-to-date with the latest version of C. But it's still very valuable. If you finish this book, you will be a C ninja, and it isn't too hard.

K&R is outdated, in my opinion, because it is too skimpy.

Interpreted languages are put together for ease and speed of programming, so the programmer gets stuff done quicker.

Compiled languages are put together to let the programmer work harder to create programs that have some kind of high performance. So the end product can be quicker, even if it more expensive to produce.

Only a few languages try to bridge the gap. Most notably Go. Go is compiled but is also set up to be easy to use. The result is a nice mixture of good performance and ease of programming. See golang.org.

Considering there is a war between many Arab entities and Israel, the different parts of Israel get along pretty well.

In Israel, there are Moslem and Druze cops, soldiers, judges, doctors, nurses, and so on. If peace ever breaks out, things will improve.

The rules in Moslem societies are terribly discriminatory. Look up the history and meaning of the word Dhimmi. Non-Muslims cannot testify in court and cannot even visit the city of Mecca.

One of the reasons a Jewish State was established is that Islam forbids equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. Other reasons, of course, involve Europe and Christendom.

The fragile-making disease is feature-creep. "Cat -n considered harmful".

Simple one-off programs designed at the keyboard can be so useful they get re-used and enhanced with more one-off hacks until they reach the point of utter incomprehensibility.

Linux

I have a Dell Inspiron laptop that's about 1.5 years old. It runs 14.04 LTS just fine. With one exception: The external USB CD/DVD drive is not supported. The built-in CD/DVD drive works like a champ, so it's okay.

Sometimes I boot the Windows-7 partition.

My spinning rust is a 500 GB drive.

How you should buy your machine also depends on what country you are in. Local suppliers often give much better support than mail-order.

Password managers can protect you from being "Hacked" in the manner of destroying all your Gmail, and can help prevent your computer from being enslaved by a botnet. And probably help protect your bank account and any online medical records.

But if the NSA or any competent government targets you as an individual, no password manager can help you. TrueCrypt might help, but even that has vulnerabilities.

I went to their website, opisrael.com, yesterday and today. It's been counter-hacked by Israelis, and apparently it stays hacked when the Israelis do it.

There is a large security industry in Israel.

Back when they taught me the number line and the Cartesian plane, it all seemed smooth and straightforward.

In the years since, I've seen primes, rationals, irrationals, Mandelbrot, and all manner of weird structures popping up out of what seemed like nothing.

How did this happen? And who put all that stuff in there?

Your problem is your lack of problems. Build an app that adds empathy to a person they can understand the problems of other people. Make zillions.

Write an app that summarizes complaints from around the web and collates them into an organized list. That should help.

Jungle Disk/AWS

In Go, nil is a value, not a type. Assigning 'nil' to an interface only assigns the value, not the type. An interface has both a value and a type at runtime, but is "nil" only if both the value and the type are nil.

If these guys are really spending billions to deny global warming, there ought to be more than a few people who have become millionaires doing the propaganda work. Know of any?

Blogging is free, so they really spending billions on television? Have you heard lots of TV ads denying warming?

I'm skeptical about the "Billions" spent by the rich deniers. We're told they hide their funding, using big money. So how were they found out?

Could be true, of course. I just want some evidence. And I want to know who are the public figures getting all that dough.

1. Allen Newell at CMU AI built a system called Lstar that was only for "Greenspuning", it was a language for bootstrapping up higher languages. It's very hard now to find even a mention of this on Google. This was decades ago.

2. I recently have been spending time learning and using the Go language from Google. It has almost no facilities for booting new languages. Nowadays that's called building a DSL. The thing is, Go is very useful, efficient, and easy to learn. Plus, it has an excellent system for concurrent and parallel programming. They explicitly decided against building in facilities for DSLs, as they are seen as making systems hard to understand.

Alan Kay wasn't wrong, he had a particular point of view. To me, today, Kay's view seems old-fashioned compared to Go. Both Go and Kay's OOP are very sophisticated. In very different ways.

Did you use any parallelism/concurrency? There ought to be a way to speed up the Go version with parallelism. This is fair as that is one of Go's strengths.

Go is a better language than PHP. Much better. It also compiles to machine code, and has excellent multi-thread facilities (goroutines) that boost performance and also make coding simpler (Not more complex!).

But you might find coming up to date on PHP easier, since you already know an old version of it.

There are many more coders available for PHP than Go. But Go programmers on average are higher in quality because the drudges and blubs don't bother learning new languages.

Recently one of my hosting providers sent me a notice that my account was being transitioned to a new version of PHP. That can't happen with a compiled language like Go, since the none of the language itself goes up on the website, only the executable program binary.

I don't know much about Node.js...

Go has both faster run-time performance and stricter type checking than Ruby, Python, or JS, competitors in the server space.

Go development is fast, because the language is simple and it compiles very quickly.

Once you've made it, you certainly don't want to recode. Although, of course, if you've super-made it, you can just get more hardware. But even the largest web companies can run into the performance bottleneck. Like Google, apparently.

The Go Authors say one of the motives for building Go was the very long compile times of building C++ apps for large-scale web development. One thing they mentioned in particular was the large compile times due to processing and reprocessing of #include files. We know Microsoft ran into the same problem because they put Pre-Compiled Headers (PCH files) into their C family tools. Go has an import facility that prevents the problems of the #include file design.

Go is trying to hit the sweet spot for large-scale development. Go is by no means the only one, of course.

Any of you guys know how well .NET does in compiling big web-scale applications? I don't.

When hiring "Experienced C Programmers", I would just show them a the short version of strcpy() out of K&R, but with variable names change from 'src' and 'dst' to 'x' and 'y'.

Just to read it and say what it did. This eliminated the vast majority of the applicants:

void strcpy(char x, char y) { while(x++ = y++); }

It's easier to evaluate the language than to predict human behaviour.

The language is very good and has excellent support and libraries.

People, though, are somewhat mysterious...

Programming Pearls: http://netlib.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/

Best Software Writing: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BestSoftwareWriting.h...

Last resort: Bring a sleeping pill and sleep through the flight.

Geany. We need something better than Syntax Highlighting. Something along the lines of the original Literate Programming. At least different fonts and styles for different syntax elements. Each package or multi-file module should have it's own background texture.

If you've got time and money to spare, and want to improve the editor you produce (not just use) then learn from the $300 SlickEdit editor. It does a lot of things right. And there's a go package for it.

Tell them your name is Orville Allegheny Smithers the Fifth.

Dev tools or just for Linux? Asked both ways...

1. Qt Creator (currently supplied by Nokia). 2. Ye Olde Command Line. 3. Visual Studio (only for Windows, natch)

Steve Blank on the Secret History of Silicon Valley: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ

History of electronic warfare -- very surprising, recently declassified stuff. Plus the history of Silicon Valley itself, from a pro-valley perspective.