They showcase delightfully a way of understanding and writing software, a kind of down-to-Earth simplicity aesthetics that is usually ditched in favor of sophistication.
I believe we're mostly past the point of favoring such philosophy (the Go programming language being maybe the most recent attempt, only partially successful at it), as it has fallen short of what the world demands from software, but it remains a very valuable influence.
Totally agreed. I cut my programming teeth on UPE and the K&R C book (2nd, ANSI edition), among others. I try to model the command-line tools I write on the style shown in those two books (Kernighan is a co-author of both); being doing that for a long time. Here's an example, a tutorial I wrote for IBM developerWorks - I mentioned it in an HN thread a while ago:
>They showcase delightfully a way of understanding and writing software, a kind of down-to-Earth simplicity aesthetics that is usually ditched in favor of sophistication.
True.
>I believe we're mostly past the point of favoring such philosophy (the Go programming language being maybe the most recent attempt, only partially successful at it), as it has fallen short of what the world demands from software, but it remains a very valuable influence.
Right, and The Go Programming Language book has Kernighan as a co-author too.
They showcase delightfully a way of understanding and writing software, a kind of down-to-Earth simplicity aesthetics that is usually ditched in favor of sophistication.
I believe we're mostly past the point of favoring such philosophy (the Go programming language being maybe the most recent attempt, only partially successful at it), as it has fallen short of what the world demands from software, but it remains a very valuable influence.