There's a new book out on Claude Shannon the Bell Labs (where else?) engineer who invented digital communication technology. He was the one to realise the power of binary notation which still underlies all, yes all, computer technology. It's a good read and has made me realise I completely omitted him from The Programmer's Odyssey! Something for edition 2.0 perhaps.

The Programmer's Odyssey mentions many religious wars from IT history and they still go on to this day. This time it's about getting rid of C/C++. What next! It seems like an opportune moment to repeat the old C joke - it's the only high level language in which you write more lines of code than if you'd used assembler.