Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 117 posts

Re: Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

#21

Post by opello »

carterdmorgan wrote: post #17
farleykr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they mean that the description of the episode should have a list of books (and maybe other resources) that were mentioned in the episode itself.

Oh yeah, that’s a good idea. We’ll have to do that. We’ve been debating setting up Amazon affiliate links to the books in the episode descriptions. We were going to wait until we were a little bigger, but after today we might have to speed up those conversations, haha.

I can appreciate supporting the effort, but the "stickiness" of Amazon affiliate links seem pretty pernicious. I briefly tried to find a source for this and failed, but my understanding is that the affiliate can see any product purchased while the affiliation through the link is active, which is something like a 24 hour timeout or another link for a different affiliate is used. Maybe my perspective is out of date, if so my apologies, but that seems like a net negative contribution to personal privacy of viewers.

Edit: This video humorously discusses the "leakage" I think of as bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2PYgjgDdWg

Re: Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

#22

Post by opello »

carterdmorgan wrote: post #15
opello wrote: post #14

A nice value in this format (since it discusses books) would be to have a comment or portion of the description dedicated to listing the books (or ideally the media) discussed to a list. I added "The Bit Player" (Claude Shannon documentary from 2018) to my watch list as well as "Recoding America," "Chip War," and "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage" to my reading list.

What do you mean by this exactly? Like a list of all upcoming books we’ll discuss? If you’re curious, you can find that on our website at www.bookoverflow.io!

Sorry, I didn't mean upcoming books, just the media discussed in the episode. Like the ones I mentioned adding to my watch/reading lists. It would have made finding them a little easier is all and could serve as value to the description since it's certainly the case that they were discussed in the video! :)

Re: Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

#23

Post by carterdmorgan »

opello wrote: post #21
carterdmorgan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, that’s a good idea. We’ll have to do that. We’ve been debating setting up Amazon affiliate links to the books in the episode descriptions. We were going to wait until we were a little bigger, but after today we might have to speed up those conversations, haha.

I can appreciate supporting the effort, but the "stickiness" of Amazon affiliate links seem pretty pernicious. I briefly tried to find a source for this and failed, but my understanding is that the affiliate can see any product purchased while the affiliation through the link is active, which is something like a 24 hour timeout or another link for a different affiliate is used. Maybe my perspective is out of date, if…

Yeah, definitely not my area of expertise. We’ll need to explore it further and make sure there’s nothing sketchy before making a decision.

Re: Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

#24

Post by dpb001 »

carterdmorgan wrote: post #7
mettamage wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you get him on your podcast? That's amazing!

To be totally honest, I just looked up his Princeton email and asked lol. I told him we loved the book and would love to interview him about it. He was like “What? I haven’t thought about that book in 20 years. But I’m sure we could find something to talk about for an hour.” He was so amazingly kind and generous with his time. He’s not the only author we’ve gotten on the podcast! We’ve already published our episode w…

Years ago he was a guest lecturer for a class I was taking from Scott Bradner - as you said, incredibly nice an approachable guy. I could have listened to him for another hour or two.

Re: Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

#25

Post by 256_ »

carterdmorgan wrote: post #20
256_ wrote: post #18

I read the Elements of Programming Style and the Practice of Programming around the same time and they became completely mixed up in my mind. I'll often remember something from one of those books but be completely unable to remember which one it was from. Both good books, and both were co-authored by Kernighan. I think they complement each other well.

We might have to add Elements of Programming Style to our backlog.

Well if you're interested, the Elements of Programming Style, to me, was interesting for two reasons. It presents plenty of timeless insights about programming, but it's also very interesting as a historical document; it argues against old-fashioned GOTO-based programming in favour of structured programming, and for-loops executing 0 times, for example.

It has a list of rules of thumb at the end, which contains my favourite part of the book. Pretty much all of them are timeless, but right in the middle is "Avoid the FORTRAN arithmetic if."

The one big thing I disagree with it on is the weird idea that you should never have 2 IFs in a row.

Re: Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

#26

Post by goosejuice »

carterdmorgan wrote: post #11
zombiwoof wrote: post #10

I wish interviewing now was more about knowing the concepts in that book versus leetcode Brian Kernighan prob couldn’t pass a leetcode hard interview in this ridiculous new world

My last interview cycle I interviewed with some big names (Stripe, Square, Shopify, etc.) and was pleased that none of them asked any LeetCode style questions. All pretty practical programming stuff. Stripe had an interview where they had forked the Jackson Java library, introduced a bug, and then asked me to find and fix it. Pretty unique style, but much more applicable to the actual job of programming.

That's a clever interview question, but wouldn't that suffer from diffing origin/main? Or was this a in person / on screen interview with no git history?

Re: Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

#27

Post by carterdmorgan »

dpb001 wrote: post #24
carterdmorgan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be totally honest, I just looked up his Princeton email and asked lol. I told him we loved the book and would love to interview him about it. He was like “What? I haven’t thought about that book in 20 years. But I’m sure we could find something to talk about for an hour.” He was so amazingly kind and generous with his time. He’s not the only author we’ve gotten on the podcast! We’ve already published our episode w…

Years ago he was a guest lecturer for a class I was taking from Scott Bradner - as you said, incredibly nice an approachable guy. I could have listened to him for another hour or two.

We would have loved nothing more than to talk to him for hours. He was already calling in from England while on his vacation, so I didn't want to take any more of his time, haha!

Re: Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

#28

Post by commandersaki »

Love Kernighan, such a humble person. In one of the videos that he was featured on in youtube, he spoke about how he was solving a difficult problem in his thesis which turned out to be NP-complete before the theory had been fleshed out. Emailed him for his thesis and got a pretty quick response, was a really interesting read.

Re: Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

#29

Post by carterdmorgan »

256_ wrote: post #25
carterdmorgan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We might have to add Elements of Programming Style to our backlog.

Well if you're interested, the Elements of Programming Style, to me, was interesting for two reasons. It presents plenty of timeless insights about programming, but it's also very interesting as a historical document; it argues against old-fashioned GOTO-based programming in favour of structured programming, and for-loops executing 0 times, for example. It has a list of rules of thumb at the end, which contains my fa…

Sounds interesting! We're trying to figure out if we should be focusing on more modern books even if they're "unproven" or classics even if they're outdated. Sometimes reading the classics can be a lot of fun because, like you said, they serve as historical documents. As someone who started their career a lot later, it's crazy to me that GOTO used to be in style, but I suppose for it to fall out of style there had to be a book arguing against it at some point. It'd be interesting to read the original arguments!

Re: Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

#30

Post by surbas »

goosejuice wrote: post #26
carterdmorgan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last interview cycle I interviewed with some big names (Stripe, Square, Shopify, etc.) and was pleased that none of them asked any LeetCode style questions. All pretty practical programming stuff. Stripe had an interview where they had forked the Jackson Java library, introduced a bug, and then asked me to find and fix it. Pretty unique style, but much more applicable to the actual job of programming.

That's a clever interview question, but wouldn't that suffer from diffing origin/main? Or was this a in person / on screen interview with no git history?

I would say that I would hire that person if that was the solution. That said maybe repo wasn’t included in interview. (Would be even better if person figure out how to diff against a new clone)
Post reply on HN