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Comment by mdhughes | Hacker News Reader

Very simplistic and shallow list, but it's by Charles Petzold, noted Microsoft shill and bad tech book writer.

In '96, LISP (tail end of the AI winter regardless), Perl (half the WWW was Perl), Tcl (maybe a quarter of the WWW and telnet-based services were Tcl), awk, & Ada were quite common, and Smalltalk, RPG, REXX, & PL/1 were at least as common as COBOL. Python was still obscure but gaining ground. PHP had just been released like smallpox on a vulnerable population.

I had a laugh at Delphi being for people who hate Microsoft. Its actual virtue was good performance and safety in large programs, you bought Borland tools because you wanted to double your program's speed, not for ideology.

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> bad tech book writer

You can't possibly mean his "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" or "The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine"? These books are great.

Those books were both brilliant. I don't recall his tech books being "bad", at least in terms of being somehow worse the the other Windows programming books that several large publishing houses cranked in volume.

I first came across Petzold this weekend while watching a talk by Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin on the future of programming. Martin was discussing Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers" and recommended reading it and Petzold's "Annotated Turing". I currently have Petzold's book on my "to-buy" list so am glad to see it spoken of highly.

Well, I didn't hear about the book yet. But seeing as your coment and the parent suggest it, I'll add it to my to-read list as well.

The Code book I've heard people speak highly off before but have not read it yet myself.

> Based on a totally unscientific survey (those programming languages that occupy at least 3 feet of shelf space in the McGraw-Hill Bookstore in Manhattan)

Use a bad metric, get bad results.

Who else remembers this era of giant, unhelpful, rapidly-obsoleted books in the computer section of bookstores? Who remembers bookstores? OK, OK, I've been into Waterstones recently, but it never occurred to me to look at computing related books. What use would they be?

1996 was the beginning of the O'Reilly heyday. If you got a book with a white cover with a coloured bar and animal woodcut on it, there was a good chance of it being helpful. Otherwise it was a lottery - there was a cottage industry of people turning out bad books about software filled with screenshots that mostly replicated the online help.

Oh God, I'm flashing back to books about game programming by André LaMothe, and my eye is twitching.

Next level: fill whole pages with output from random Linux commands with 4 verbosity flags set: https://imgur.com/a/rnVE9u4

Spent 45 EUR on this Linux Network Administration handbook by Addison-Wesley Germany as a teenager. Still hurts whenever I think about it.

(Yes, the author also did the screenshot thing: "Look, this is how you configure it using SuSE YaST, and this is how you do it using the Red Hat GUI. Let me show you every single step of the wizard GUI, just to be sure. And this is basically the whole default config file for this daemon, but with "# Created by Bad Tech Writer" prepended. There you go!")

Computing books are very useful for quite a long time... It's most of the practical stuff that ages quickly.

I can only speak for myself, but I was and am a Microsoft hater. I bought and play-tested VB, decided it was garbage and never used it again. Delphi allowed me to "do" Windows GUIs elegantly, without all that Petzold garbage and the many limitations of VB. I also loved Delphi 1 for its world-class truly useful help files.

I enjoyed Delphi's performance and recommended it to a customer for that reason, but my own primary motivation was to avoid the terminally cumbersome Windows API.

I still maintain a legacy Delphi 7 application and I completely agree with you about the help files. It's so complete that 9 out of 10 times I don't need to search the Internet for the information I need. Every time I press F1 on another application and my browser open a poorly written documentation I miss those Delphi help files.

Regarding Borland, as historical note, Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 for MS-DOS was the very last MS-DOS compiler to add support for C++.

Borland was already selling version 3 of their compiler by then.

On Windows side, Object Windows Library and Visual Component Library were much more productive, ahead of time Qt, than MFC ever was.

But then Borland's missteps meant that MFC was the only framework left, and only a couple of enterprises still get to enjoy C++ Builder's RAD productivity.

There's http://www.lazarus-ide.org now, which is still pretty productive for one-off GUIs, especially anything involving database access.

Sure, I was just focusing on the C++ part of the story, which tends to be forgotten when talking about Borland tooling.

That's unfair to Petzold. He was always a pretty good writer, though not always on very interesting themes.

"PHP had just been released like smallpox on a vulnerable population."

Touché

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