Interview With Brian Kernighan of AWK/AMPL Fame 117
Reader oranghutan brings us another in Computerworld's series of interviews with icons of the programming world, this one with Brian Kernighan, who helped popularize C with his book (co-written with the creator Dennis Ritchie) The C Programming Language, and contributed to the development of AWK and AMPL. In the past we've chewed over a few other interviews in this series, including those with Martin Odersky on Scala and Larry Wall on perl. "In this interview, Brian Kernighan shares his tips for up-and-coming programmers and his thoughts on Ruby, Perl, and Java. He also discusses whether the classic book The Practice of Programming, co-written with Rob Pike, needs an update. He highlights Bill and Melinda Gates as two people doing great things for the world enabled through computer science. Some quotes: 'A typical programmer today spends a lot of time just trying to figure out what methods to call from some giant package and probably needs some kind of IDE like Eclipse or XCode to fill in the gaps. There are more languages in regular use and programs are often distributed combinations of multiple languages. All of these facts complicate life, though it's possible to build quite amazing systems quickly when everything goes right.' 'Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia.'"
Re:The Practice of Programming (Score:4, Informative)
Thats because you're comparing training manuals to technical manuals. K&C is still useful to this day as a standard reference that still works all these years past. The only thing similar is Knuths works, one of the few compsci works created that serves as both a training and technical reference. (kids - read Shannon thouroughly as well, starting with "A Mathematical Theory of Communication")
Re:The Practice of Programming (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Practice of Programming (Score:3, Informative)
kids - read Shannon thouroughly as well, starting with "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"
Interesting, for sure, but what does it have to do with programming?
Link, by the way: A Mathematical Theory of Communication [bell-labs.com]
Re:Seriously (Score:4, Informative)
Reflections on Trusting Trust is by Ken Thompson, not Brian Kernighan.
Re:"Need" an IDE (Score:5, Informative)
I'm looking forward to languages that ... leave simple character representation (ASCII e.a.) behind.
I worked on such a thing in 1983 at DEC (look up my MIT thesis to see). Structural editing.
Conclusion: it was an absolute disaster. Programmers cannot use this. Most of the work was in altering it to be as much like a plain text editor as possible.
Don't think you have an amazing new idea.
Re:The Practice of Programming (Score:3, Informative)
What does information theory have to do with information science you ask? More than a little is my answer.