>Tamar famously called C a write-only language. Way back now, when I aspired to be a C developer, I subscribed to the leading C magazine. The last page was a column called Obfuscated C. It consisted of seemingly actual C code submitted by real C developers that defied you to understand it. I really enjoyed it.

I've heard that statement before (that C is a write-only, write-once language). Candidly, that's a false statement (usually) advanced by people who didn't write C applications for a living.

I remember the Obfuscated C column in DDJ magazine. Yes, there crap C code out there. It's mid-level nature raises the odds that you'll see nasty code - but some of the bad code in the articles was also due to horrible naming conventions and a completely lack of common sense. There's also crap VB code, crap VFP code, and even crap T-SQL code. This week I had to debug one of the worst T-SQL stored procs I've ever seen.

I also remember the famous Al Stevens column in DDJ - Stevens wrote clean code and showed you could use C for application development. I also remember the great work of Allan Holub (also of early DDJ fame) who offered a ton of good C code. In a prior post I mentioned Sequiter Software and their great CodeBase product - they provided source code and it was a great way to learn advanced C.