first of all, why do you think this guy is a Linux programmer? his's is blog has shit about BASIC, mainframes and Lithp but not much about Linux. is this you, Nikita? make your're are game
second thing, his's is a fucking leaf and SJW.
third, it's not irrelevant bullshit. take this code: char *combine(s, t) char *s, *t; {
int x, y; char r[100];
strcpy(r, s); y = strlen(r); for (x = y; *t != '\0'; ++x) r[x] = *t++;
r[x] = '\0';
return(r);
}
his's is absolutely right, it's terrible! not only does it reinvent strcat inefficiently (and insecurely - but then again, it's not like strcat was secure in the first place), it also returns a stack-allocated local buffer, which I'm pretty sure is undefined behavior. and that's not academic irrelevant shit, this code will simply break on a modern OS. I think that the hypothesis that the author is an electronics guy with a knowledge of BASIC is right on point, and he repackages those very specific bits of knowledge into general advice without understanding that this won't work for most use cases.
basically, it's a dude writing a book on C without knowing much about C. it would maybe make sense as a 'programming AVR microcontrollers in C' (or whatever the hell that guys was using this code for), but preferably with caveats that it uses shortcuts and otpimizations which make it bad for portable code.