1990: Programming languages

In 1990, I drew thirteen cartoons for the computing industry press. They were never published, so here they are from the Beholder archive. They have no particular artistic merit, but they’re mildly interesting from a nostalgically geeky point of view.

5. C

Notes:
Somehow I managed to get through my programming life without every really writing much C, which is a shame because I did both low-level assembler and, of course, high level languages (including more Java than I cared for) so I think I would have been quite happy with it. By the 90s it already had a certain hard-core credibility about it. I also regret the use of the word “senile” in the footer of this cartoon — it’s simply stupid and I doubt the number 25,000 has any meaning either. Sometimes we do things when young and silly that we can’t explain twenty-five years later; but when (in 2015) I decided to put these drawings online I chose not to correct anything. Pretty much everything about the words, presentation, and drawings would be totally different if I were to do them now.

I named these verbose cartoons “the Need To Know Guide to Programming Languages”. Note that this was nothing to do with Danny O’Brien & Dave Green’s Need to Know (NTK) newsletter, which did not come along for another seven years (and to which I enthusiastically subscribed).

You’re free to use the illustration for anything provided you attribute Beholder as the source (a CC BY 4.0 license).

See more vintage Beholder nostalgia.