I don't disagree. The use of technical terms is sloppy, and some of the examples are weird (at the end, Prolog is said to be somehow an experiment along the same direction as Scheme...).
But I thought this was smart:
"C was shaped by poets. Kernighan, Ritchie, Pike, and Thompson built the language alongside the idiom. This had an effect equivalent to Petrarch writing in Italian. The language suddenly found itself in possession of existence and poetry at once. It has no theoretical basis. It has no overarching logic. [...] but in the hands of a master, it scintillates as its brethren do not."
It gets at the way the concise coding style in the K&R book guided people to a programming idiom that is pleasurable to write and read in a way that comparable languages, say Pascal or Basic, are not.
But I thought this was smart:
"C was shaped by poets. Kernighan, Ritchie, Pike, and Thompson built the language alongside the idiom. This had an effect equivalent to Petrarch writing in Italian. The language suddenly found itself in possession of existence and poetry at once. It has no theoretical basis. It has no overarching logic. [...] but in the hands of a master, it scintillates as its brethren do not."
It gets at the way the concise coding style in the K&R book guided people to a programming idiom that is pleasurable to write and read in a way that comparable languages, say Pascal or Basic, are not.