Comment by teo_zero

Thank you, but this thread was not about writing good code, but rather how often one ends up acritically copying existing "legacy" parts without even attempting to understand it.

I probably used the wrong words: "conveys no information" was meant as "is less meaningful than the printf". Just like switching on the PC every morning is essential, but if you ask me what my job's about, I wouldn't mention it.

In the same vein, I'm convinced that the printf is the part that expresses the goal of the program. The rest, the #include, the main(), even with the optimizations that you suggested, is just boilerplate, the part that is usually copied and pasted, not because it's not useful and not because it's too difficult to get right, as the original article claims, but because it's boring.