Friday, April 23, 2010

Computing Now | January 2009 | Theme: Software's 25th Anniversary

Computing Now | January 2009 | Theme: Software's 25th Anniversary:

"Sometimes the Old Ways Are Best
by Brian Kernighan

As I write this column, I'm in the middle of two summer projects; with luck, they'll both be finished by the time you read it. One involves a forensic analysis of over 100,000 lines of old C and assembly code from about 1990, and I have to work on Windows XP. The other is a hack to translate code written in weird language L1 into weird language L2 with a program written in scripting language L3, where none of the L's even existed in 1990; this one uses Linux. Thus it's perhaps a bit surprising that I find myself relying on much the same toolset for these very different tasks."