In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.

Being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

Anyway, in a world of cheap PCs and fast Internet links, we find pretty consistently that the only really limiting resource is skilled attention.

A software system is transparent when you can look at it and immediately see what is going on. It is simple when what is going on is uncomplicated enough for a human brain to reason about all the potential cases without strain.

There is a flip side to this. In the Unix world, libraries which are delivered as libraries should come with exerciser programs.

Transparency is therefore more than an esthetic triumph; it is a victory that will be reflected in lower costs throughout the software’s life cycle. 6.2.2.

Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C.

Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.

Python language is one example. As we noted above, it is also heavily used for mathematical and scientific papers, and will probably dominate that niche for some years yet. 18.3.3.

It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature.