I'm the author of the series of articles in question, so I thought I'd explain myself...
Yes, in the example in the first episode, I have shown a simplified prototype for main. For the record, in 25 years of writing C professionally, I have yet to come across a compiler which considers main returning void to be an error, and actually, for a lot of real-world C programming (embedded systems, standalone PC applications etc), nothing is ever done with the returned value anyway.
Had I decided to show the strictly correct prototype for main in the first episode of an introduction to C, I would have needed to explain what an int is, which would mean I would have needed to explain variable types. I'd also have needed to explain what an array of string pointers is (argv), and by the time I'd done that, I would a) have used up all the allotted 1000 words and b) scared off every beginner who was reading it!
As some have suggested above, I do indeed show and explain the correct prototype for main later in the series, but I considered it to be an unnecessary complication in the first instalment. If you know enough about C to know that it's wrong, you probably don't need to be reading a series called "an introduction to programming in C"...
