It is mostly a table of contents. But it does load instantaneously.

I think it is the "originally" that is the point. Hypercard was an interesting prototyping tool. It was both really powerful and really limited, but was especially nice for trying things out quickly. I remember attending a MacHack where Danny Goodman was the presenter on a new thing called Hypercard. He was so enthusiastic it was easy to get excited, but the reality was a little less. We played with it some at work but mostly stuck with C or Pascal for things that mattered.

Reprinted from columns in Communications of the ACM by Jon Bentley.

I've got aluminum siding and it really does mess up cell phones and also things like wireless weather stations.

I first heard the station wagon full of tape reference from a co-worker at Pacific Northwest (National) Laboratory in 1985, so the quote predates the Tanenbaum reference by at least a decade.

On the other hand, we all like to eat. It is in our selfish best interest that there be farmers, preferably satisfied with their lot, so that there will continue to be the nice choices at the corner grocery store.

I wrote my first programs in 1972 and I still program for a living. It used to be decks of cards, then hardcopy terminals, then "glass" terminals, then smart terminals connected to old mainframes, CDC Cybers, DEC, Data General and Prime mini and supermini computers, then Apple IIs and Commodores, then early PCs with DOS, then the early Macintoshes and Windows machines, scientific workstations from Sun and HP, played with Crays for a while, then back to new Macintoshes and desktop workstations. I've programmed databases, scientific modeling, data acquisition and control systems for nuclear reactors, internet banking applications, data archiving, device control, financial institutions and national laboratories, web applications, UNIX network applications, Macintosh GUI things, FORTRAN, BASIC, Smalltalk, Lisp, Pascal, C, C++, PHP, shell scripts, DCL, MUMPS, Ada, ... I've taught at the university level and programmed for fun with my kids.

I still like going to work every day. I still read up on new technologies. I can tell I'm not as keen to keep learning the latest and greatest, but I had a pretty good 35 year run before feeling any burnout. If you're feeling it after 10 years then something seems wrong to me. I felt like I was just really getting good at stuff about that time.

I still have a FORTRAN program and data deck from college written in 1974. The ink has faded but is still legible and of course I can always hold the cards up and read the hole punches.

Absolutely correct. The "what" can always be figured out by reading code; the "why" has to be deduced unless it is explained.

Just my opinion: the "why" can be best expressed as comments at the block or function level.

I call BS.

80 columns is how many characters fit on a punch card. Period. They made terminals to be that width because of the punch cards, not the other way around. I programmed for a quite a few years before the glass terminal was even invented.

A lot of PHP code is just making function calls to the built-in library functions anyway, and those library routines are all compiled C/C++. If I call a library function from C or from PHP there is some difference in overhead when setting up the call and processing the results but the actual function is likely to be the exact same thing.

I don't care where a co-worker went to school, I just want to see his or her code and documentation and talk with them about the thought process that went into their work. Results matter. I've worked with PhDs from hot shot schools (CMU, MIT, etc) and I've worked with self taught folks. Both have been good and not good. The bottom line is who gets the work done, not who knows more theory.

Absolutely these two:

# Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
# Advanced UNIX Programming