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Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]
- Drygord 2y ago[flagged]
- arina_pr44 2y ago[flagged]
- fuzztester 2y agoI'm only one third of the way through the video, but could see that the podcasters are asking some good insightful questions. Thanks for sharing, OP.
- carterdmorgan 2y agoI just found out we cracked the Top 20 on Hacker News! Crazy! I’m Carter, one of the podcasters from the video. I’m glad you’re enjoying it! It was such a huge honor to talk to Brian Kernighan.
- jjice 2y agoI hadn't heard of this podcast until just now, but an entire show dedicated to software book sounds like a dream come true! I'm going to download a few of these for the train. I love that you guys are diving into such a niche!
- carterdmorgan 2y agoThanks so much! When we had this idea, I was certain that it had to have been done before because it seemed like such a gap in the market. To my surprise, it didn’t exist! We love the format because not only do we learn a ton, but by focusing on the books we keep the discussions substantive and avoid becoming the millionth “tech news of the week” podcast.
- mettamage 2y agoHow did you get him on your podcast? That's amazing!
- carterdmorgan 2y agoTo be totally honest, I just looked up his Princeton email and asked lol. I told him we loved the book and would love to interview him about it. He was like “What? I haven’t thought about that book in 20 years. But I’m sure we could find something to talk about for an hour.” He was so amazingly kind and generous with his time. He’s not the only author we’ve gotten on the podcast! We’ve already published our episode with Mark Richards on “Fundamentals of Software Architecture” but we also have in the can and ready to go over the next few weeks Neal Ford of “Fundamentals of Software Architecture” and John Ousterhout of “A Philosophy of Software Design.” That’s not public knowledge yet, so consider it an exclusive Hacker News comment section scoop, haha! We also have some pretty big names we’re in talks with, but I won’t make any promises until the interviews are actually recorded. But we’ve been so thrilled at the author response so far and are super excited about the future of the podcast!
- dpb001 2y agoYears ago he was a guest lecturer for a class I was taking from Scott Bradner - as you said, incredibly nice an approachable guy. I could have listened to him for another hour or two.
- carterdmorgan 2y agoWe would have loved nothing more than to talk to him for hours. He was already calling in from England while on his vacation, so I didn't want to take any more of his time, haha!
- mr_toad 2y agoAuthors seem to treat podcasts the way celebrities treat talk shows, it’s basically free marketing.
- dinkumthinkum 2y agoI found your podcast a few days ago on a different book. Keep it up, I think you have a good niche and doing something you rarely see, which are deep dives on programming books. The only other one I really know of is Connor Hoekstra has a couple nice playlists on SICP and something else but this is a little different, good job.
- carterdmorgan 2y agoThanks for listening! Which book was it that you found? It’s definitely a breadth over depth kind of podcast, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. We wanted it to feel like hearing two coworkers discuss a book over lunch. We don’t provide comprehensive reviews, but rather just highlight what we found the most interesting, while trying to keep it substantive.
- fuzztester 2y agogotcha, and agreed. bwk is one of my software heroes, along with dmr, bs, lw, gvr, etc.
- JetSetIlly 2y agoI love the Practice of Programming. Of all the books on programming that I've read, the lessons of that book are the ones that remain strongest in my mind. I've not read it in many years but I feel it influences my practice everyday.
- carterdmorgan 2y agoIt was the first time I’ve ever read it and I was surprised how much of it still held true given it’s 25 years old. Some of the specific programming examples are pretty outdated, but the general ideas are as solid as ever!
- bigdict 2y agoCurious what examples you felt were outdated.
- carterdmorgan 2y agoThey mention at one point that Java doesn't have a way to pass a function as a parameter to another function. That was added in Java 8 with lambdas. That's just one off the top of my head.
- bigdict 2y agoAh ok thanks.
- dehrmann 2y agoNit: it's still right. Lambdas are just functor sugar.
- marcosdumay 2y agoThe only mainstream languages where you can actually pass function references around, without them being sugar for some complex object that the compiler creates are C, C++ and Rust. And it's not trivial to do in Rust.
- zombiwoof 2y agoI wish interviewing now was more about knowing the concepts in that book versus leetcode Brian Kernighan prob couldn’t pass a leetcode hard interview in this ridiculous new world
- kps 2y agoReminiscent of Peter Higgs (Nobel Prize winner for the eponymous boson) saying that he would not be able to get an academic job today, not to mention Katalin Karikó (Nobel Prize winner for mRNA) being demoted by UPenn for not attracting grant money.
- carterdmorgan 2y agoMy last interview cycle I interviewed with some big names (Stripe, Square, Shopify, etc.) and was pleased that none of them asked any LeetCode style questions. All pretty practical programming stuff. Stripe had an interview where they had forked the Jackson Java library, introduced a bug, and then asked me to find and fix it. Pretty unique style, but much more applicable to the actual job of programming.
- senderista 2y agoIn my most recent interviews with Apple and Amazon there were no LeetCode questions after the phone screen. Quite a change from previous experience.
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoWhat are they asking these days and what positions was this for (i.e. a senior role?)
- senderista 2y agoFor the Apple interviews it was all systems programming stuff, e.g. "implement mmove", "read integers off the wire preserving endianness", etc. Amazon was much more focused on behavioral stuff (i.e. their leadership principles) and system design. This was for Amazon L6 and Apple equivalent, nothing very senior.
- opello 2y agoA nice value in this format (since it discusses books) would be to have a comment or portion of the description dedicated to listing the books (or ideally the media) discussed to a list. I added "The Bit Player" (Claude Shannon documentary from 2018) to my watch list as well as "Recoding America," "Chip War," and "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage" to my reading list.
- carterdmorgan 2y agoWhat do you mean by this exactly? Like a list of all upcoming books we’ll discuss? If you’re curious, you can find that on our website at www.bookoverflow.io!
- farleykr 2y agoI think they mean that the description of the episode should have a list of books (and maybe other resources) that were mentioned in the episode itself.
- carterdmorgan 2y agoOh yeah, that’s a good idea. We’ll have to do that. We’ve been debating setting up Amazon affiliate links to the books in the episode descriptions. We were going to wait until we were a little bigger, but after today we might have to speed up those conversations, haha.
- opello 2y agoI can appreciate supporting the effort, but the "stickiness" of Amazon affiliate links seem pretty pernicious. I briefly tried to find a source for this and failed, but my understanding is that the affiliate can see any product purchased while the affiliation through the link is active, which is something like a 24 hour timeout or another link for a different affiliate is used. Maybe my perspective is out of date, if so my apologies, but that seems like a net negative contribution to personal privacy of viewers. Edit: This video humorously discusses the "leakage" I think of as bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2PYgjgDdWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2PYgjgDdWg
- 256_ 2y agoI read the Elements of Programming Style and the Practice of Programming around the same time and they became completely mixed up in my mind. I'll often remember something from one of those books but be completely unable to remember which one it was from. Both good books, and both were co-authored by Kernighan. I think they complement each other well.
- carterdmorgan 2y agoWe might have to add Elements of Programming Style to our backlog.
- 256_ 2y agoWell if you're interested, the Elements of Programming Style, to me, was interesting for two reasons. It presents plenty of timeless insights about programming, but it's also very interesting as a historical document; it argues against old-fashioned GOTO-based programming in favour of structured programming, and for-loops executing 0 times, for example. It has a list of rules of thumb at the end, which contains my favourite part of the book. Pretty much all of them are timeless, but right in the middle is "Avoid the FORTRAN arithmetic if." The one big thing I disagree with it on is the weird idea that you should never have 2 IFs in a row.
- mkehrt 2y agoBecause I was curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_IF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_IF It's a three way if statement that scrutinizes a number rather than a boolean, with branches for negative, zero and positive values.
- carterdmorgan 2y agoSounds interesting! We're trying to figure out if we should be focusing on more modern books even if they're "unproven" or classics even if they're outdated. Sometimes reading the classics can be a lot of fun because, like you said, they serve as historical documents. As someone who started their career a lot later, it's crazy to me that GOTO used to be in style, but I suppose for it to fall out of style there had to be a book arguing against it at some point. It'd be interesting to read the original arguments!
- commandersaki 2y agoLove Kernighan, such a humble person. In one of the videos that he was featured on in youtube, he spoke about how he was solving a difficult problem in his thesis which turned out to be NP-complete before the theory had been fleshed out. Emailed him for his thesis and got a pretty quick response, was a really interesting read.
- carterdmorgan 2y agoIt's a rare combination to find someone both as intelligent and humble as he is. Truly a blessing to our industry.
- kaba0 2y agoI believe you are right as intelligent grows, but the very top end usually has people excelling in many things and personality as well. At least that’s what I noticed.
- carterdmorgan 2y agoCertainly successful intelligent people often excel in personalities. Hard to get places without playing nice with others to a degree.
- fuzztester 2y agosee the publications section here for more of his books: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan
- dgb23 2y ago> Love Kernighan, such a humble person. A perfect example: Just about 3-4mins into the interview he said that the motivation behind the book was "kind of pretentious". To me, and many others, his opinions on programming are amongst the most interesting and useful. In large parts because he can convey them so clearly.
- xyzzy_plugh 2y agoThe "g" is silent, folks. You should try to get Rob Pike on. He'd probably make it a point to correct your pronunciation. I can hear him now...
- carterdmorgan 2y agoYeah, someone on YouTube pointed out the same thing. D'oh. I wish Brian would have corrected us! We'd love to get Rob Pike on too! Currently working on it, although he's a little harder to get a hold of.
- rramadass 2y agoThis book is foundational; all Programmers (especially beginners) should read it. Like all Kernighan's books, the language is simple, concise and precise focusing on the foundations/essentials with no fluff and all in a little over 200 pages. Understand the principles from the examples shown here and then apply them in your own context. The beauty of K&P's books is that they do not overwhelm you with theory but show you the craft/practical applications of it after which a study of the theory becomes more accessible. To give a concrete example; i had some experience in network programming/protocol implementations before i came across this book. In the "Notations" chapter, they show network message pack/unpack routines written in the style of printf/scanf functions with format strings specifying the packet layout! This was a eye-opening lesson for me in the use of proper notations and little languages. There is also some code snippet examples showing ideas behind Virtual Machines, Code Threading, JIT compilation etc. Folks should also get Kernighan and Pike's older book "The Unix Programming Environment" to go with this. The chapter "Program Development" gives a complete example of developing a compiler for a small calculator language using compiler development tools (and no theory!) in around 50 pages. This is the smallest and simplest exposition that i know of on how to write a compiler. In summary; get all of Kernighan's books and study them! :-)
- mehdix 2y agoCan only second you. His style is by far my most favorite among all other technical authors. And thanks for the reminder, time to get another one of his books.
- rramadass 2y ago> His style is by far my most favorite among all other technical authors. All authors should learn from Kernighan's books (co-authored with Plaugher/Ritchie/Pike) on how to write technical books. 90% of all the computer programming books published nowadays are too verbose (why the hell are they so huge?), meandering over inessentials, lack of clarity in language, a paucity of clear and precise examples and overall just a waste of paper. Reading them is more of a chore then enlightening whereas all of Kernighan's books are only a little over 200 pages, dense with knowledge and a pleasure to read.
- fuzztester 2y agoAnother author and his books in the same category of excellence as Kernighan and his books, is Jon Bentley and his books Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley_(computer_scientist) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley_(computer_scient...
- carterdmorgan 2y agoAdded to the backlog! As our audience grows, we've debated doing live backlog grooming on YouTube so that listeners have a chance to chime in and voice their opinions on what we should read.
- fuzztester 2y agoI think that's a good idea.
- rramadass 2y agoAlso his earlier slim Writing Efficient Programs book. What this teaches you is how to think about efficiency from the top down with an emphasis on Algorithm and Language and hence useful to all programmers. Pair it with modern books on efficiency which deal mainly with compiler-level/OS-level/Processor-level performance techniques by Agner Fog, Fedor Pikus etc. and you get a complete picture.
- fuzztester 2y agothe war stories briefly mentioned in the footnotes of the book, are very interesting too. for example, one of them is about a team that speeded up the run time of a quicksort implementation on a supercomputer by a factor of a thousand times (yes, times, IIRC, not percent), by doing successive optimisations at many layers of the stack, from high level algorithms and data structures, down to the hardware.
- fuzztester 2y ago>with an emphasis on Algorithm and Language did you mean algorithms and data structures?
- fuzztester 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan that link mentions many more of his achievements.
- fuzztester 2y agoI suggest you add Software Tools in Pascal to your list of books to podcast about. Also by Kernighan. I own a copy of that book and think it is good.
- pjmorris 2y agoFinding 'Software Tools in Pascal' in my local mall bookstore, before I even had access to a computer running Pascal, turned out to be a kind of cheat code for my career. I marveled at the ideas and the writing and it set me up to acquire much of the the rest of the Kernighan canon.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoYou might get more than you bargained for on that topic. Kernighan and Plaugher had written "Software Tools" in RATFOR. Then they wrote "Software Tools in Pascal". And then, in direct response to the experience of writing that, Kernighan wrote a paper titled "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language". (Because writing in Pascal should have been way easier than writing in RATFOR, and it wasn't, and Kernighan gave some thought to why it wasn't.) It's still an interesting read. You can find it online, for example at https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas... Note well: This refers to the original standard version of the language. Extensions like Turbo Pascal fixed many of the problems. (Except that, as he said, there was no portability between the extensions. Even that kind of was fixed by Turbo Pascal becoming the "standard" extensions.)
- rramadass 2y agoJust to add to the above; RATFOR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfor) was implemented as a preprocessor to Fortran with its control structures almost identical to those of C. So going from the freedom of C syntax to the straitjacket of Pascal might have been too much and hence the Pascal paper. Here is the pdf of Brian Kernighan's paper on RATFOR - http://www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger/research/repro/ratfor.pdf http://www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger/research/repro/ratfor.pdf
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- fuzztester 2y agoKernighan is also a co-author of The Go Programming Language book, at least of the 1st edition.
- voidUpdate 2y agoIs that why Go forces K&R brackets instead of letting you choose?
- fuzztester 2y agoKernighan was a co-author of the Go book, but I don't know how much he was involved with the actual design of the language. Maybe not much, or at all, although, of course, he is a key part of the original Unix mafia (my term, not pejorative, rather meant admiringly, because I cut my programming teeth on UNIX and C software and books, and worked on that platform a lot, earlier), many of whom are still going strong in their 70s and 80s. So the Go bracket style may not be attributable to him.
- bxparks 2y agoMaybe you already know this and your comment was in jest, but the real reason is that the Go lexer automatically inserts semicolons (https://go.dev/doc/effective_go#semicolons https://go.dev/doc/effective_go#semicolons) using heuristic rules which forces the opening brace to be on the same line.
- fuzztester 2y agoI never liked that decision.
- fuzztester 2y agosneer. sneer. sneer. heck, that sounds like three cheers. so i should abbreviate it to three sneers in future. :) so, three sneers, for yet another blindly downvoting hn hive mind bro type who can't handle even an innocuous opinion (like my "never liked that decision" comment above), just because it is different from their own opinion. in other words, homo intolerantis. there are a lot of such jokers on this site. who cares about that behaviour, though? not me, for sure. hn is just some site, not important in the real world, except for those people who have nothing better to do than hang around here all day or night, and snipe at and try to put down others. iow, trolls and loser types. as amy hoy said somewhere a while ago, maybe on her site or on twitter, fuck hn. look, uncle darwin, i discovered a new (creepy) subspecies of homo sapiens, who i hereby name homo intolerantis. :) keep downvoting me, bro type, even pull in your friends to do more of it, and thereby waste all your time, and get ulcers and high blood pressure because of my innocuous comment, probably you have a lot of free time because of no job because of layoffs, while i have a good laugh at your stupidity and cheap malice.