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The Kernighan thing is a kinda and a definitional problem. No he didn’t work on the kernels or C. But he did work on awk and write a lot on top of roff that m
by salmo 4y ago
The Kernighan thing is a kinda and a definitional problem.
No he didn’t work on the kernels or C. But he did work on awk and write a lot on top of roff that made Unix useful to Bell. It really started as a documentation system internally. Also he was the primary test driver of a lot: building tools with tools. I think he’s too humble about his work.
His memoir, mentioned by another commentator, is an amazing read. I highly recommend it.
- oso2k 4y agoI’d give Brian Kernighan credit for a lot of the userspace of early UNiX. Besides awk, he wrote and/or contributed to many other tools, wrote lots of documentation, man pages, filmed videos introducing UNIX, played historian and documentarian roles as well. Today, you might call him Technical Marketing Manager or Developer Advocate. He did a lot to make UNIX usable and known to the world outside of AT&T.
- salmo 4y agoYeah, huge early adopter of lex and yacc. Really drove the potential of pipes. He’d take half baked ideas and show Thompson, Richie, et al the real potential. Kicked off many late nights of their inspired work. Such a supportive human being, too. I’ve been using awk for 20 years, and when I read his memoir I had a light bulb go off and really got it like I never had before. Such an amazingly powerful tool. He’s an incredible writer. So many of his books have demystified things that were vague to me. I still read his papers that use real terminals, etc. because I always obtain some kind of mini enlightenment moment. The Unix Programming Environment is so great and the books he supervised like TCP/IP Illustrated by Stevens. I keep the first volume of the latter on my desk to show “that’s not how that works.” Those diagrams <3.