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In case you're not aware, Brian Kernighan worked with Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs. Brian wrote a lot of the Unix text processing utilities, and
by redis_mlc 7y ago
In case you're not aware, Brian Kernighan worked with Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs. Brian wrote a lot of the Unix text processing utilities, and is the "k" in awk.
"In 1970, Brian Kernighan suggested the name "Unix", a pun on the name "Multics."
His family is from Canada. I had the opportunity to attend a small lecture at U. of Waterloo on "Little Languages" when he was in town in the mid 80's, with about 10 other students. One of my biggest influences.
Some context on the article link. There was a time when CS was a novel area of research. A lot of the experimentation into OS theory was made obsolete by Linux, since you could just tweak an Open Source kernel instead of doing a PhD-length project in schedulers, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan
- ignoramous 7y agoMy favourite Brian Kernighan fact: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Hello,_World!%22_program#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Hello,_World!%22_program#...
- chrisweekly 7y agocool, TIL (origin of "hello, world" convention)
- KMag 7y agoBack at Google in NYC, my manager and I had desks near Peter Weinberger, and on the other side of us, way down a hallway was Brian Kernighan's (part-time) desk. My manager was complaining about awk within earshot of Peter, making embarrassingly sloppy cheap-shot arguments, and rather loudly. I said to him "You know awk stands for Aho (/me points out window), Weinberger (/me points over at Peter) and Kernighan (/me points down toward Brian's desk), right?" My manager kind of ducked his head and quickly dropped his volume. I never interacted with Kernighan, but everyone said he was very friendly and surprising humble. Weinberger was always very friendly when I interacted with him in the micro-kitchen, but I never worked on a project with him.
- pton_context 7y agoI've similarly heard nothing but good things about Kernighan as a teacher and as an advisor!
- redis_mlc 7y agoYes, Brian seemed like a nice guy when I met him. On a related topic, after AOL bought Netscape, many of the "refugees" went to Yahoo. There was one little wing with most of the famous server and HTML pioneers sitting next to each other, including Rob McCool and Laura LeMay. FYI: awk is fine if you don't have perl installed, but perl is 10x faster, and more amenable to modular programming.