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Comment by billfruit | Hacker News Reader

There was a "C Unleashed" book, a massive tome of 1000+ pages written by many famous programmers, many of them who where quite active in comp.lang.c, like Richard Heathfield and CB Falconer, had quite insightful material in it.

Any one remember the heyday of comp.lang.c? I wonder what goes on in there now.

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I wasn't sure anyone but the authors remembered C Unleashed! I wrote the chapter on binary search trees and balanced trees.

Comp.lang.c was important to me for many years. I've met 5 or so of the regulars at least once. The most famous comp.lang.c regular is probably Tim Hockin of the Kubernetes project.

Ben Pfaff... There's a name I recognize from back then. :-)

Is it beej or bj?

One syllable, typically. But either works.

Thanks.

Thanks very much! The code from the book proved very useful since C does not have a standard library of rich data structures.

I bought that book ages ago. Good stuff. comp.lang.c still has a small group of knowledgeable regulars, but a lot of the "old guard" seems to have stepped away. And Usenet is a shadow of its former self, obviously.

Reddit has more traffic nowadays.

There was a thread about that group a few months ago and this post in particular really stuck in my mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127632

That's what I remember from comp.lang.c -- lawyer-ly obsession with ANSI C, rather than C as it's being used. That is an important distinction which I respect, but they should have had some kind of sister forum that's more practical. They denied that hardware exists, etc.

Also, obsession with ANSI C, analogous to obsession with POSIX shell, is sort of "middlebrow" in the sense that the people who WRITE the spec need to go outside of it to create a new version of it. Good specs are derived from real usage.

Yes, usenet was huge for me back in the early 90s when I had questions on C programming. I would ask them on comp.programming.c and had some of the best programmers providing guidance. Of course they were strict with questions/discussions being specific to ANSI C.

#c on EFnet!

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