Software Engineering a.k.a. Programming

I first became interested in programming in high school in the early '70s when I had an opportunity to play with a programmable desktop calculator. Later I learned several high-level languages, first Fortran, then Pascal, and C. C remains my favorite compiled programming language, and the UNIX operating system is my preferred operating and programming environment.  I also write programs for shells (I prefer Korn shell), in awk, and in sed. Though I can program in C for Microsoft's Win32 environment (Windows/Windows NT), it is an unpleasant experience for the following reasons:

1. Many critical OS functions are undocumented; important and useful things cannot be done without insider information.
2. System call return values are much less consistent than in UNIX.
3. There are often multiple, inconsistent methods of doing the same thing, e.g. beginthread() vs. CreateThread().
4. The system call interface is verbose and tedious due to the typical SomeSillyRunTogetherBunchOfWordsWithMixedCapitalization naming which is used.
5. The different flavors of MS Windows behave quite differently to many system calls, leading to program complexity to handle the variations.
6. Doing fairly simple things tends to require a half-dozen or more system calls.
7. There are many bugs, which require extraordinary steps to work around.
8. The Microsoft OSs themselves are rather buggy and tend to crash frequently (I've had UNIX systems stay up and running efficiently under moderate to heavy use for more than 6 months at a stretch; my current record for Windows NT with the latest service packs under similar conditions is 4 days).
9. The slightest piddling change seems to require OS rebooting.
10. OS performance and/or stability degrades rapidly (i.e. within a matter of days) with use to the point where it becomes unusable -- again the only recourse is rebooting.

I could go on (and on and on), but that's enough.

Recommended reading (not OS- or language-specific):

• The Elements of Programming Style, Kernighan & Plauger, 1978, ISBN 0-07-034207-5
  • The authors' version of Strunk & White's classic The Elements of Style as it applies to programming. See excerpts below.
• Writing Efficient Programs, Jon Bentley, 1982, ISBN 0-13-970244-X (paperback), 0-13-970251-2 (hard cover)
  • see excerpts below
• Programming Pearls, Jon Bentley, 1986, ISBN 0-201-10331-1
  • This book and its sequel are adapted from the author's column by the same name in the Communications of the ACM. These books contain many pointers to other interesting books. See excerpts below.
  • The Second Edition (ISBN 0-201-65788-0) of this book (but not of More Programming Pearls) has been published.
• More Programming Pearls, Jon Bentley, 1988, ISBN 0-201-11889-0
  • The sequel to Programming Pearls
• The Practice of Programming, Kernighan & Pike, 1999, ISBN 0-201-61586-X
  • A wide-ranging tour of the issues. See excepts below.

Sampler:

• Excerpts from The Elements of Programming Style
• Excerpts from Writing Efficient Programs
• Excerpts from Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls
• Excerpts from The Practice of Programming

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