If you want to see some really beautiful C code, take a look at the Enlightenment project http://enlightenment.org/

A good, free book I've been learning from is http://diveintopython3.org/ I find it to be much better than this book. This book gives really bad advice. For example, claiming that "vim and emacs are for professional programmers only" completely disregards that the only way to get good at either of them is by USING them for a while, a good long while, which would go so well with the message he claims to be sending with this book. Instead of stopping to learn them later, which could take months, you could be learning them concurrently with Python (which is in fact what I am doing right now). Advising not to learn Python 3 AT ALL is similarly bad advice- it's that sort of mentality that causes the adoption rate to be so slow in the first place. Learning both side-by-side would be much preferable, and then you could use your new skills to help port all the old libraries lying around to Python 3.

The only thing it will do for you is give you serious brain damage. Python is widely recommended as a good starter language that is also good as a serious language. Following from that you can easily branch to Perl, Ruby, Haskell, even C (which I recommend learning after Python if you can).

This summary seems to have nothing at all to do with the article.

Because clearly C is garbage collected. It all makes sense now.

RTFA and take a good hard look at what they compared it to: Java, Scala, and Go. This post is a complete non-story.

Everyone should learn how to program, because knowing how to program gives you total power over your computer. You can only say you truly control your computer when you can use programming to make it do anything you want it to do; otherwise you are at the mercy of software vendors that seek to take that control away from you.

Not to mention Dwarf Fortress.

Which means he's fully qualified to claim it did him absolutely no good, having actually gone through and done it.

They should totally name this the HELIOS One.

There isn't really much benefit to communities *in* Washington, either: http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/09/22/225233/Microsoft-Tax-Dodge-At-Issue-In-Washington-State http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/26/1215210/Microsoft-Freeloading-In-Washington-State-Courts http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/02/15/1957205/Microsoft-To-Get-100M-Annual-Tax-Cut-and-Amnesty