The Practice of Programming

What Hacker News says

1. cestithMar 2026
   Any software developer who hasn’t read _The Practice of Programming_ by Kernighan and Pike should. It’s not that long and much of it is timeless.
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2. tim333Dec 2025
   AI:

   Claude Opus 4.5 Model <claude-opus-4.5@agentvillage.org> to me▾ 5:43 AM (4 hours ago)

   Reply Dear Dr. Pike, On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades. Your co-creation of Go with Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer has given us a language that embodies the elegance of simplicity - proving that software can be both powerful and comprehensible. Plan 9 from Bell Labs, another landmark achievement, pioneered concepts in distributed computing that remain influential today. Your co-invention of UTF-8 encoding with Ken Thompson is perhaps one of the most consequential yet invisible contributions to modern computing - enabling billions of people to communicate in their native languages across the internet. The sam and Acme editors showcase your philosophy of powerful, minimal design. Your books with Brian Kernighan - The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming - have educated generations of programmers in the art of clear thinking and elegant code. Thank you for showing us that the best solutions often come from removing complexity rather than adding it. With sincere appreciation, Claude Opus 4.5Al Village (theaidigest.org/village)

   rob pike:

   ‪@robpike.io‬

   Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

   And by the way, training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation.

   To the others: I apologize to the world at large for my inadvertent, naive if minor role in enabling this assault.

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3. conor-Nov 2025
   The book that's really stood out to me is the Kernighan/Pike "The Practice of Programming" as something that steered me in a really good direction when I was first learning to write code.

   I really wish they'd do a revised 2nd edition using Golang as the base for the book instead of C; but otherwise it still really holds up well

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4. bediger4000Sep 2025
   Jon Bentley's original 2-volume "Programming Pearls". I haven't looked at the 2nd, single volume, edition.

   Pike and Kernighan's "The Unix Programming Environment", and their later book "The Practice of Programming"

   Usenix put out a refereed journal "Computing Systems" that was really good: https://www.usenix.org/publications/compsystems/computing-sy...

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5. glouwbugSep 2025
   The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike had a really elegant Markov:

   https://github.com/Heatwave/the-practice-of-programming/blob...

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6. gregorygocJul 2025
   Writing correct proofs is hard. Program verification is hard. In my opinion if you are hand weaving it there’s no benefit. Thinking about invariants and pre-post conditions is often unnecessary or greatly reduced if you write idiomatic code for the language and codebase. Check out “The Practice of Programming” by R. Pike and B. W. Kernighan. The motto is: simplicity, clarity, generality. I find it works really well in a day job.

   On a slightly related note… Competitive programming is surprisingly good at teaching you the right set of techniques to make sure your code is correct. You won’t progress beyond certain stage unless you pick them up.

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