Ask HN: Zed Shaw's critique of K&R

#1

Post by gilesgate » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:39 AM UTC

I've read of Zed Shaw's critique of K&R in "Learn C the Hard Way", and I've gathered that he had indeed raised an interesting range of issues, regardless of the backlash.

I've tried tracking that critique down to no avail. A link to Shaw's website that I found wasn't accessible,[0] nor was any archive.org copy of it.[1]

Does anyone happen to have a copy of or a link to it? I'd be interested in reading through it.

(Disclaimer: I'm not interested in refueling a debate, I just would like to read the critique or find out its salient points.)

[0] http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/krcritique.html

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/*/c.learncodethehardway.org/book/krcritique.html

Re: Ask HN: Zed Shaw's critique of K&R

#2

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 12:55 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Zed Shaw's critique of K&R

#3

Post by sverona » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 3:10 PM UTC

I doubt my Google-fu is better than yours (and it looks like Zed has basically retracted what he said anyway by way of going so far to remove it from the Internet) but one of the salient points was definitely "some of the code in the book doesn't compile or do what it says it does."

Re: Ask HN: Zed Shaw's critique of K&R

#4

Post by antiquark » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

Try google with "PDF" as part of the search term, there seem to be a couple of stragglers on the web.

Re: Ask HN: Zed Shaw's critique of K&R

#5

Post by jdmoreira » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

"Learn C the Hard Way" is considered by many to be a horrible book on C

Re: Ask HN: Zed Shaw's critique of K&R

#6

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 5:09 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Zed Shaw's critique of K&R

#7

Post by klingonopera » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

antiquark wrote: post #4

Try google with "PDF" as part of the search term, there seem to be a couple of stragglers on the web.

Use "filetype:pdf" to limit results exclusively to PDF-docs. Works on DDG too.

Re: Ask HN: Zed Shaw's critique of K&R

#8

Post by klingonopera » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

sverona wrote: post #3

I doubt my Google-fu is better than yours (and it looks like Zed has basically retracted what he said anyway by way of going so far to remove it from the Internet) but one of the salient points was definitely "some of the code in the book doesn't compile or do what it says it does."

One of his criticisms was the (usual) critique of C's null-terminated char arrays (to be precise, that failure to include an null-terminator in a char array causes overflow, thus functions needed to be designed to accommodate such cases), and another was stylistic critique, one with which I agree with ZS, that optional curly braces should never be omitted, no matter how mundane.