>Man, I miss making a living as a C programmer. Same here. I worked quite a lot on C on Unix and some on Windows (including working on a successful database mi

>Man, I miss making a living as a C programmer. Same here. I worked quite a lot on C on Unix and some on Windows (including working on a successful database middleware product on Windows, which was used in some VB+Sybase/Oracle client-server projects) before I got into other languages like Java, Ruby (and Rails) and now Python for quite a while. Great fun working in C, although of course frustrating at times too, debugging weird issues. Also, somehow, I never found working with pointers (at least for simple to intermediate uses of them) confusing, like some do. (I once taught a C programming class at a large public sector company; while I was explaining the int main(int argc, char argv stuff, and the pointer to pointer stuff, the head of their IT dept. who was in the class, said "now it is 'overhead transmission' :)". Maybe I didn't have trouble with pointers because I had some hobbyist assembly language programming background from earlier, including learning about different addressing modes, such as direct, indirect, indexed indirect (or vice versa) (on the 6502 processor), etc., plus used to read a lot on my own about microprocessors, computer architecture, and suchlike related areas, even though they were not directly relevant to my higher-level application programming work (hint hint, to kids learning computers today). Working close to the machine is good. Also, a bit off topic, I kind of independently discovered the concept of refactoring. I was in a nice relaxed state one afternoon, at work, after a good lunch, but not heavy, so not drowsy, working on some Unix C program (likely a CLI one), and over a period of time, I noticed that I had been making small (behavior-preserving) incremental improvements to the code, one after another. In a very relaxed way, without any tension, taking my time for each small change, so I was fairly sure that each small refactoring change did not change the meaning or correctness of the program. Thought that was a good technique after I realized that I had been doing it. Unfortunately did not keep doing it with other code. It was only some years later that I read about the term "refactoring" and about Martin Fowler's book on the subject. I'm sure others must have discovered the concept similarly. Anyway, interesting incident.