K&R still holds a place for me as one of my favorite programming books. It may not hold up today, especially not for new readers, but at a time when the alternatives were Pascal, Fortran, Basic and Assembly, the C Programming Language was an intoxicating blend of power and elegance. In addition to serving as an introduction to C, K&R was opinionated in a way that I hadn't seen from other programming books to that point, with as much emphasis on style as how to get things done. It's the Strunk and White of programming (or was at the time).

I know you probably mean it as a compliment to K&R, but you shouldn't compare K&R with S&W: while both are opinionated, the advice in K&R is coherent and sensible!

S&W is a bizarre book: it's a pleasure to read because the authors are both excellent writers, but they don't know anything about grammar so their advice often makes no sense. Seriously, read it again (it's a short book) and count how many times they actually follow their own grammatical advice (their advice not about a technical grammar point is usually sound, and you should, for example, omit needless words). My opinion is that you should take S&W as style exemplar, but not a style guide.

Geoffrey Pullum's article 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice explains all this better than I can: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/50years.pdf

> It's the Strunk and White of programming (or was at the time).

On the chance you don't know — and because many don't — Kernighan & Plauger wrote The Elements of Programming Style a few years earlier.

Even when the alternative was (Common) Lisp?

That's an interesting comparison. K&R did nothing for me, I honestly did not understand C until I read Harbison & Steele.

K&R blew my mind when I was a teenager, but years flipping through it again it does nothing for me. I think the experience somebody will have with K&R depends greatly on their previous experiences.

It's certainly not "mind-blowing", and is not intended to be, but it is a brilliant example of how a technical book on a specific programming language should be written.

The point some of us are trying to make here is that K&R works for some learning styles but not others. It's definitely not universal.

"Blow my mind" might be a bit of an exaggeration, but whatever magic was once in the book is now gone for me. Experience with other books and other languages has shifted my perspective such that K&R no longer feels special to me.

30 years later I still love K&R . Harbison & Steele is a fantastic reference.

However, I could never get into SICP mostly because it was so... impractical and pure.

Besides i'd had enough of RPN working on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_MK-61 .

I suppose one should get into SICP when one is still at the right age (<25)

> it connects programming to larger and vital human endeavor

What endeavour exactly?

Good question -- I appreciate it. The application of human ingenuity to solving problems maybe (engineering in the widest sense). But there's something even more abstract, I think... Something more like _thinking_ most generally. It's almost like reading philosophy in the way it carefully and openly walks through a progression of thoughts...