4 ms·

An inteview with Brian Kernighan, co-developer of AWK and AMPL

17 points by edw519 17y ago

davidw 17y ago
I found this in the preface to "my" [1] book: > In addition to my coauthors, many other people have contributed to the success of this second edition. Clif Flynt, Jeff Hobbs, Brian Kernighan, Steve Landers and Mark Roseman all spent significant time and effort on critiquing and improving the technical content. gulp. I hope I didn't come across too badly. My portion of the book was about Tcl's C API. 1) http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/09/15/tcl-and-the-tk-toolkit-2nd-edition http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/09/15/tcl-and-the-tk-toolkit...
- jacquesm 17y ago
  That's an interesting story there. Especially how hard it is for 'digital' people to adapt to the speeds of things like publishing houses. If you don't mind my asking, how many copies were sold ?
  - davidw 17y ago
    No idea - I'm not officially an author (I'm a contributor, I suppose; I don't recall the publishing term), not in contact with the publisher directly, but more than anything, the book just came out in September! So it's early in any case. My guess is that it won't sell that much as Tcl and Tk are, sadly, not so popular these days.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      So little time, so many interesting languages ...
- mahmud 17y ago
  Ouch david, quite some acts to follow, but I know you can hold your own :-) P.S. I still have a Tclplugin app deployed at my brother's office. A construction company using an in-browser tcl-plugin for their office automation software. If I had the foresight to publicize this I could have gotten some exposure. And yes, the backend for that app is in Lisp, Allegro Serve running on Slackware 9 and SBCL 0.8.2 :-) That was way before github, social coding and blogging; we got no props for deploying "fringe" technologies haha.
  - davidw 17y ago
    Tcl would have far better than Java as a web plugin, but I guess they went with Java rather than Tcl at Sun and the rest is history.
jacquesm 17y ago
Interesting how being on the cover of a book about a language gets you to be co-author of that language in the eyes of lots of people. I certainly fell for it, until this interview I had no idea! By the way, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C entry in wikipedia now only has a link to the C# language, not to C!

17 points by edw519 17y ago

I found this in the preface to "my" [1] book: > In addition to my coauthors, many other people have contributed to the success of this second edition. Clif Flynt, Jeff Hobbs, Brian Kernighan, Steve Landers and Mark Roseman all spent significant time and effort on critiquing and improving the technical content. gulp. I hope I didn't come across too badly. My portion of the book was about Tcl's C API. 1) http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/09/15/tcl-and-the-tk-toolkit-2nd-edition http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/09/15/tcl-and-the-tk-toolkit...

jacquesm 17y ago
That's an interesting story there. Especially how hard it is for 'digital' people to adapt to the speeds of things like publishing houses. If you don't mind my asking, how many copies were sold ?
- davidw 17y ago
  No idea - I'm not officially an author (I'm a contributor, I suppose; I don't recall the publishing term), not in contact with the publisher directly, but more than anything, the book just came out in September! So it's early in any case. My guess is that it won't sell that much as Tcl and Tk are, sadly, not so popular these days.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    So little time, so many interesting languages ...
mahmud 17y ago
Ouch david, quite some acts to follow, but I know you can hold your own :-) P.S. I still have a Tclplugin app deployed at my brother's office. A construction company using an in-browser tcl-plugin for their office automation software. If I had the foresight to publicize this I could have gotten some exposure. And yes, the backend for that app is in Lisp, Allegro Serve running on Slackware 9 and SBCL 0.8.2 :-) That was way before github, social coding and blogging; we got no props for deploying "fringe" technologies haha.
- davidw 17y ago
  Tcl would have far better than Java as a web plugin, but I guess they went with Java rather than Tcl at Sun and the rest is history.

jacquesm 17y ago

Interesting how being on the cover of a book about a language gets you to be co-author of that language in the eyes of lots of people. I certainly fell for it, until this interview I had no idea! By the way, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C entry in wikipedia now only has a link to the C# language, not to C!