Aleksey Dolya interviews Brian Kernighan, one of the creators of the AWK and AMPL languages and someone who has seen the birth of UNIX and C.
Interview with Brian Kernighan, co-creator of AWK and AMPL
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Kernighan agrees that C is the best language. All you “Objective C”, C#, Perl etc programmers can go shove it sideways!
And my recipe for beef stew is the best in the world too. I invented it.
I would like to obtain your recipie for beef stew. I, as weird as it sounds, am a collector of beef stew recipies.
Email me to get it.
Kernighan is _not_ the inventer of C. Eugenia please read the article before you comment.
My mommy told me never to email strangers.
By the way, I enjoy your articles. Keep up the good work.
He was one of the participants in the whole thing. That’s good enough to be biased.
>My mommy told me never to email strangers.
your loss.
Beginnner please read Eugenia’s article before you comment 😉 There is nothing about invention.
>> Kernighan agrees that C is the best language. All you “Objective C”, C#, Perl etc programmers can go shove it sideways!
There’s no such thing as “best” language.
Languages like PERL (Practical Extraction and Report Language), Objecttive-C, C#, Java, Haskell, Prolog, LISP, PHP, Python, Scheme, etc. have different paradigms and diferent functions.
The author recognises this too and say it uses Java, C++ and Visual Basic in his work.
You can however say that’s C it’s one of the best general purpose languages around. I can’t tell the same about Pascal (any flavour) and (arghhh!) Basic.
By the way it’s LisP (List Processing, not LISP.
Sorry, but it pisses me off when people say JAVA instead of Java.
😉
I really liked his comment about Microsoft, see it is possible to admit to Microsofts good points and admit to their bad ones while still being a nix user. Amazing I know, but it seems it is possible
He shouldn’t have asked that question in the first place. That one, and the “linux or bsd” question completely ruins what would be otherwise great interview.
“He shouldn’t have asked that question in the first place.”
Why not? Brian Kernighan accepted the question and answered it in a polite and understandable way; ergo it wasn’t a “stupid” question ….
“That one, and the “linux or bsd” question completely ruins what would be otherwise great interview.”
In what way?
“He was one of the participants in the whole thing. That’s good enough to be biased.”
…. so your biased towards your “whole thing” you are participating.
it was LISP before it was lisp or Lisp or whatever you want to call it. Look at the literature from the 50s and 60s. Back then even Fortran was FORTRAN. Hell, back in the 60s Unix was UNIX.
I remember as a youngster seeing books in my fathers bookcase with the title of “FORTRAN with WATFOR and WATFIV”
Could have something to do with the limited character sets on terminals (or in the case of Lisp and Fortran, punch-cards) you know, shouldn’t let spelling back from those days affect things too much