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Brian Kernighan's Home Page
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throway453sde 5y agoDid not knew Brian Kernighan has authored so many books. This is useful.
- marstall 5y agoNice! just put "Unix: A History and a Memoir" in my Amazon cart.
- jjice 5y agoFantastic book. It's a genre that's lacking, but this is in my top 2 CS history books (up there with The Dream Machine, but that's a lot of hardware as well).
- thomasahle 5y agoThis follows the classical Prof. Dr. Style of academic websites: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/ Unfortunately many of the examples in the article have since been replaced by boring template website from the university or institute.
- johndoe0815 5y agoI still prefer this "raw" HTML style and use it to provide information about my own courses instead of the stupid and dysfunctional "learning management system" (Blackboard) that our university wants us to use. It's much faster to add information to the handwritten web page than to use the Javascript GUI mess and this also makes it much easier for students to discover information.
- smorrow 5y agoDoug McIlroy: https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/ https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/ Tom Duff (not a professor though): iq0.com
- jjice 5y agoIncredible man, just like his coworkers as Bell. All of that Bell Labs team is fantastic. Obvious Ritchie and Thompson are top dogs in our minds, but McIlroy and Cherry, and the rest of the gang that I don't know the name of are part of such an incredible part of CS history. Kernighan is an excellent writer and in every interview I've ever seen, he's the most humble man you could imagine. Him and Ritchie taught me C, and to that I am appreciative.
- smorrow 5y ago> and the rest of the gang that I don't know the name of are part of such an incredible part of CS history. For CS-historic significance the ones I would add would be Aho and Steve Johnson.
- blantonl 5y agoFor those that don't know who Brian Kernighan is: basically, he's one of the founders of the UNIX operating system with Bell Laboratories, and a significant early contributor to the C programming language: among other amazing accomplishments that literally all of us touch in one way shape or form today.
- chrisfinazzo 5y agoAt this point, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the students only know him as Prof. Kernighan. CS majors are certainly nerds, but most of the stuff that made Brian famous happened well before they were born. Quite a second act, if you think about it.
- alophawen 5y agoDon't forget plan9 and golang
- cogburnd02 5y ago> significant early contributor to the C programming language source? http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?I=info.Brian_Kernighan http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?I=info.Brian_Kernighan says that > Kernighan has said that he had no part in the design of the C language: "It's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work". He did help write the first device-independent troff (The original by Joe Ossanna only worked with one specific type of computer-controlled typesetter.) and helped write the K&R C book, and the K in AWK is him, too.
- noarchy 5y agoHelping to write K&R C would make him a "significant early contributor to the C programming language" to many people here.
- cogburnd02 5y agoeh, I suppose that's fair.
- xiaq 5y agoI knew that he was one of the coauthors of the Go book, but surprised to learn that he's written more books after that! What a career.
- optimalsolver 5y agoGreat video of Brian Kernighan & friends at Bell Labs explaining the UNIX system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
- nope96 5y agoI was reading "The C Programming Language" as a teenager, probably around 1994. I had a question, so I looked up Brian Kernighan's email* and wrote him. Ten minutes later I had a well written answer that explained my issue. It didn't seem like a big deal to teenage me, but now - wow, that was the magic of the early internet. * There is a small chance I am remembering this wrong, and I'd written Dennis Ritchie instead. I know I wrote to either K or R :)
- psyc 5y agoSomeone once advised me that I should do this when so moved. Since then I have emailed various luminaries, and I don't think I've yet failed to get a helpful response. Anything from a URL, to a sentence, to 2 paragraphs.
- mindcrime 5y agoSimilar thing here, but the email was to P.J. Plauger. At the time he was the editor of C/C++ User's Journal and I had a question about something I read there, and shot him an email. Didn't really expect anything of it, but I got a helpful reply.
- annoyingnoob 5y agoThe PhishBowl page it links to is great! https://informationsecurity.princeton.edu/phish-bowl https://informationsecurity.princeton.edu/phish-bowl
- usrbinbash 5y agoKernighans Books are the gold-standard I measure all instructional textbooks against.
- patrec 5y agoDunno. IMO, the only good thing that can be said about The C Programing Language is that it's short. The AWK Programming Language, on the other hand, is indeed a classic.
- derekp7 5y agoThe shortness is what makes it great. I recall going through a couple of thick C books, not getting anywhere. Until I picked up the K&R book, and was writing usable C within a couple weeks.
- jstx1 5y agoIn addition to the books, he's the 'k' in the awk programming language and he came up with the name Unix.
- birriel 5y agoI appreciate that many CS heavyweights have such plain webpages. Stallman and Larry Wall are some other examples.
- inglor_cz 5y agoI like the plainness in general, but on contemporary monitors, this means that lines of text are very long, causing eye fatigue pretty quickly. Typography is an art way more ancient than computers and I feel that it should be taken into account even on webpages; famously, Donald Knuth studied typography pretty deeply when designing TeX.
- timeon 5y agoJust double click on Safari's title bar and the window will automatically adjust it's width.
- wrycoder 5y agoWorks on any screen, desk, mobile. Works in Lynx from the command line. Just narrow your window, maybe by changing the width of your sidebar.
- Thrymr 5y agoThis is from the old school of thought on the web, the HTML is only about content and semantics, and all the typography should be left to the browser (and user preferences). If the default font in your browser causes fatigue for you, you can change the defaults. This is hardly possible with most websites now without intrusive browser extensions.
- dnfehren 5y agoEh, this looks like most academic personal pages, heavy or lightweight. Some promo of their books, minimal content and links to papers or presentations that are at least 2 years behind the current year (whatever the current year is).
- ubermonkey 5y agoSome of it is probably generational. Kernighan will be 80 this year. Ritchie, gone now 10 years, was a little older. Wall and Stallman are a generation younger -- true Boomers, if you will, born in the 50s. The computing topics tackled by those generations were foundational, but they also predate the web as a Thing. So they're ON the web, to one degree or another, but it's not their focus. By the time you get to the next gen of folks -- and let's just use GenX as the label; I mean folks born in the early 60s through about 1980 -- the people making contributions have the web as a MAJOR component of the computing landscape. These folks are "web native," and so it makes sense that they'd have fancier web pages/sites because the tools and technologies for doing such things are part of their remit, or at least close to it. Twiddling with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was a big deal for a long time, and it showed in the pages of folks like (say) Eric Meyer. I'm 51, born in 1970. I don't think I ever saw a web presence for anyone more than about 5 years older than I am that was elaborate, or the sadly-now-withdrawn-from-public-life Mark Pilgrim.
- cmollis 5y agoI was at Princeton once (maybe 15 or 20 years ago) for a meeting with one of the startups that spun out of one of their graduate programs.. The guys asked to meet me at the CS building (which was pretty cool to actually be in because I could have never gotten into Princeton as an undergrad!). Anyway, I'm walking down the hall and I see a door that says 'Brian Kernighan'.. I turned and asked them if that was 'THE Brian Kernighan'? they chuckled and said 'yeah..that's him'. I couldn't believe it.. I wish I had met him.. but it was pretty cool to see the guy just walking around.. talking in his office, etc. This guy had a huge part in inventing something that runs most of the networked world.. and there he was.
- ubermonkey 5y agoFor someone like Kernighan, the end of the inscription on Christopher Wren's resting place -- ie, St Paul's, in London -- is entirely appropriate: SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE "If you seek his monument, look around you."
- jacobsimon 5y agoI was a lowly CS undergrad at Princeton, never even took Kernighan’s class but spoke with him a few times in passing. On graduation day, my father was standing around in the back and struck up a conversation with him, oblivious that this was the legend of the department. Yet even so, they had a great conversation and Kernighan even slipped in some nice things to say about me. So on top of everything, he’s also an extraordinarily kind and humble man.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThis reminds me of the time when I was contractor at IBM Research. Right around the corner from my office there was an office with a tag "Benoit Mandelbrot" and a few doors further down there was the name of one of the Gang of Four. Never saw either of them unfortunately :-(
- cogburnd02 5y agoJust replying to the top comment in the hopes that this'll get seen: He's doing a keynote for linux.conf.au this year: https://old.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/riwm4x/brianwkernighan_will_give_a_keynote_at/ https://old.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/riwm4x/brianwkernigha...
- amosj 5y ago> MY NAME IS BEING USED IN A PHISHING ATTACK. > DO NOT RESPOND TO MAIL OFFERING MONEY FOR UNDERGRAD RESEARCH ASSISTANTS. I wonder if that's been effective. I suppose the targets are students at Princeton so once repeated enough, on his web page and elsewhere, it'll make using his name less profitable.
- pzo 5y agoconsidering how many people commenting on HN didn't notice it and commenting on something different I don't think it will be much effective - this headline is quite hard to notice for people who are banner blind.