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This is a category of cursed knowledge which causes psychic damage to the reader. When you go down certain rabbit holes you develop a fascination with obscure

This is a category of cursed knowledge which causes psychic damage to the reader. When you go down certain rabbit holes you develop a fascination with obscure forms of programming and start to realize it has some powerful benefits of which you can never take advantage because it isn't widely adopted. To free yourself from this curse write ten regular for-loops in C and say a prayer to K&R while tighly holding your copy of The C Programming Language.

mqpasta 5y ago
Ah, true!
DonHopkins 5y ago
Can I write one regular for loop to ten around one regular for loop, instead of ten regular for loops?
goto11 5y ago
I find it rather weird to compare K to C. In what circumstances would the choice be between K and C? A more reasonable comparison would be between say Python with numerical libraries and K.
- richarme 5y ago
  K&R is a common nickname for the book "The C programming language" by Kernighan and Ritchie, and a reference to the authors: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language
  - jstanley 5y ago
    But TFA is about K.
danwills 5y ago
I know it's a joke but I don't really agree that this area is cursed! It just delves way deeper into syntactical terseness than many programmers will tolerate.. even compared to assembler it's quite a different beast. I think still potentially very interesting if you're keen on expressing the most computation using the smallest number of characters though!
agumonkey 5y ago
I developed this on a society scale. Every time I go to a place and people are using very wrong ways (from normale like using an old excel file as a collaborative dB or wilder like printing Excel sheets to write changes wih a pencil to edit the file later...) I go depressed.
aaron-santos 5y ago
If you internalize this cursed knowledge, you will see how language[C]-evangelists cherry-pick which dimensions to measure the value/success of a programing language. Don't proceed. It will make you frustrated, cynical, and disillusioned with the state of PL discourse.

mqpasta 5y ago

Ah, true!

DonHopkins 5y ago

Can I write one regular for loop to ten around one regular for loop, instead of ten regular for loops?

goto11 5y ago

I find it rather weird to compare K to C. In what circumstances would the choice be between K and C? A more reasonable comparison would be between say Python with numerical libraries and K.

richarme 5y ago
K&R is a common nickname for the book "The C programming language" by Kernighan and Ritchie, and a reference to the authors: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language
- jstanley 5y ago
  But TFA is about K.

danwills 5y ago

I know it's a joke but I don't really agree that this area is cursed! It just delves way deeper into syntactical terseness than many programmers will tolerate.. even compared to assembler it's quite a different beast. I think still potentially very interesting if you're keen on expressing the most computation using the smallest number of characters though!

agumonkey 5y ago

I developed this on a society scale. Every time I go to a place and people are using very wrong ways (from normale like using an old excel file as a collaborative dB or wilder like printing Excel sheets to write changes wih a pencil to edit the file later...) I go depressed.

aaron-santos 5y ago

If you internalize this cursed knowledge, you will see how language[C]-evangelists cherry-pick which dimensions to measure the value/success of a programing language. Don't proceed. It will make you frustrated, cynical, and disillusioned with the state of PL discourse.