Link o' the day: Brian Kernighan on the Elements of Programming Style

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Tommy McGuire
Labels: software development, link

Brian Kernighan, co-creator of AMPL, gave a talk on the Elements of Programming Style in 2009 at the Institute for Advanced Study. The hour-long video is well worth a watch, although you should beware of the fire alarm at about 58 minutes.

Kernighan, who now teaches at Princeton, continues the format of the original Elements of Programming Style by examining unsavory code found in the wild, either in programming textbooks or real-life software, but with up-to-date examples. Among the other, less interesting, points, at about 11:48 bwk indicates that he does not know how strpbrk should be pronounced.

Does anyone reading this know what C (at 28:00) and C++ (43:45) books he is talking about? Those examples are horrible.

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