"The way C handles pointers was a brilliant innovation." (1993 Knuth interview) | Hacker News Reader

"The way C handles pointers was a brilliant innovation." (1993 Knuth interview)

tex.loria.fr

18 pointscrocus10 comments

I spent fifteen years using electronic mail on the ARPANET and the Internet. Then, in January 1990, I stopped, because it was taking up too much of my time to sift through garbage.

I think this paragraph was very interesting:

> All through my life, I've always used the programming language that blended best with the debugging system and operating system that I'm using. If I had a better debugger for language X, and if X went well with the operating system, I would be using that.

I love Lisp, I love Python. But are their debugging tools and OS integration as good as .NET development or Java development?

But are their debugging tools and OS integration as good as .NET development or Java development?

Most Lisp programmers don't dig themselves into the holes that the .NET and Java debuggers are good at getting you out of.

Also, if Emacs is your OS, CL integrates quite well.

What you're saying is that Python & Lisp debugging tools and OS integration are as good as .NET and Java. I agree.

The problem is that it's hard to convince other people of that, without forcing them to try it for a while.

Agreed. UNIX is the IDE for Lisp and Python. It's very functional and very customizable, but the learning curve is kind of high. So high, in fact, that most people never realize it's an IDE.

How high? I've been trying to learn lisp for a while, and it's been kicking my ass. How long did it take you?

A day spent reading the emacs lisp manual was enough to productive. CL is a whole 'nother animal, but once you get a feel for the language, it's just a matter of searching the hyperspec. Eventually you learn that the function you are trying to implement is probably already built in in about 12 different variants.

> I'm going to have fascicles of about 128 pages coming out twice a year. We're gathering four of them before we come out with the first two actually; we're going to keep some in the pipeline! Look for the first fascicles in 1995 or 1996; they will be beta-test versions of the real books. I'm thinking I can finish Volume IV (parts A, B, and C) in the year 2003, Volume V in 2008, then come out with new editions of Volume I, II, and III, then work on VI and VII... There will be a "Reader's Digest" version of volumes I through V.

I guess there's been a little bit of schedule slippage:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html

Volume 5 is "Estimated to be ready in 2015."

Doing away with bare pointers and having "object references" was an even better one. You get the most useful part of the power of pointers, but none of the potential headaches.

I think his comment about IMP might apply to a few of the terser modern languages (emphasis mine):

"The second thing about IMP was that it was an extremely terse language. For example, where in PASCAL you would say "IF X > 0 THEN...", in IMP you say "X+=>". In other words, your program was very short. You felt like you were writing elegant programs, because there were only a few characters, but you couldn't read them the next day! Being very terse meant that you couldn't fathom this bunch of marks on the page..."

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