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Linux Journal Interview With Brian Kernighan
pndiku writes "Linux Journal has an interesting interview with Brian Kernighan where he talks about AWK, AMPL and how he had nothing to do with the creation of C."
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He mentions that he considers C to be the best combination of expressiveness and efficiency. I wonder, fellow Slashdotters, what you think the most expressive language is (efficiency aside)?
Amazing magic tricks
He says " I wound up at Princeton" and "through good luck I got a job at Project MAC at MIT" and "probably because of the MIT experience, I got a job at Bell Labs in the Computing Science Research Center". Princeton, MIT, Bell Labs?? not easy!
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
While your argument may be beginning to hold some weight now, I find your position wrong for most of the history of computers. Historical Microsoft has been on the low-end of the price scale. In fact this is why they are scrambling against Linux, because they've usually been able to beat competitors by undercutting them in price (often destroying markets at the same time). I think you can argue that Microsoft has stifled innovation, but I don't think you can argue that they charge unreasonably high prices. Furthermore, outside of the OS, most other pieces of software are easy to migrate away from. If Microsoft's prices were "unreasonably" high, don't you think someone else would have taken over the Office Suite market by now?
Very practical. He wants to use the computer as a tool. Not a propaganda platform. Windows is fine and dandy for some applications, Unix for others. It all depends on what you're trying to do.
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Yeah, but the variable is just a label. The actual type in question is either int or int*.
However, you example clearly shows where 'the C++ way' (and I'm one of these who got into coding after C++ was fairly standardized, and so never have done any 'real' C) is not the preferred answer.
The preferred answer is: knowledge.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
int foo, flash, up, left;
int *bar, *bang, *down, *right;
Or even better:
int foo;
int flash;
int up;
int left;
int *bar;
int *bang;
int *down;
int *right;
Just because a language allows a construct doesn't mean you have to use it. This is a coding-style argument, which are of course all subjective.
I can never define any sort of function pointer in one line: I always have to typedef tthe function and then have a pointer to it. While I can work out, with a manual in hand, how to do it in one line, the syntax is so unintuitive that I never do it: I will just have to reach for the manual again wh en I maintain it.
This is a valid problem that has to do with operator precedence. In C the operator precedence is arranged in such a way most commonly used expressions can be written without a lot of brackets. I think this is more convenient, because normally you don't define a lot of function pointers, but you do use at least some pointer arithmetics.
The mistake I would junk is allowing enum {fred=36, bill=19, joe=333} ; Which confuses predefined constants with the classic enumeration.
A constant in C is not the same as an enum. Simply put constants are addressable, enum items are not. One could choose to introduce yet another construct for unaddressable constants, but this is far more practical.
And again, you don't have to use every feature in a language just to make your code more interesting. C was designed as a language-of-choice, not as a bondage-and-discipline language. If you don't like your freedom, don't use it, but please don't start whining you've got too much freedom.
It should read, "Conversation with God (or a God)".
Jokes aside, the names Kernighan and Ritchie are firmly planted in the minds of most CS majors. We have "celebrities" like Torvald or Stallman but at the end of the day, professors always say "Read page XXX in Kernighan and Ritchie", which we always proceeds to ignore until our code doesn't work. Then once again, we reach for the pretty little white book and thank someone or something for the well written proses. Unlike many other CS books, K&R seem to have cover most of the possible contingencies a fledgling CS major might have. I hate books that tell you how to do things only in one way, their way. K&R was written so well that I didn't have to.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Microsoft didn't bring computing to the masses, nor did it hinder it, the HARDWARE platform it was lucky enough to be attached to brought computing to the masses. The openness of the PC hardware made it more affordable than alternatives, and made the hobbiests like it for tinkering, giving the best of both worlds, attracting people BOTH from the 'I want to tinker' camp, and from the 'I want it cheap and don't care about the details' camp. Remember the 80's? The Mac was universally hated by the very same people who today talk about how cool OS/X is for being BSD based. That's because in the '80s the marketplace was driven by people who were willing to learn new software and new languages without even blinking an eye, and so the computer buying decision was driven more by the hardware than the OS that sits on top of it.
Think about when PC's were becoming popular in the '80s with thousands of titles available for Microsoft DOS. The fact that the OS was DOS was largely irrelevant to those packages. They took over the whole machine when they ran and the OS's job was over once the program was running. So people didn't care that DOS was crap. What mattered is that at a time when the hardware wasn't fast enough to make a real OS feel "snappy", DOS could be shoved aside so your program had the whole CPU and memory to itself. It worked because at the time you couldn't spare the memory and time for a "real" OS.
DOS was a success because it was attached to PC's, not because of any features of DOS itself.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The fact that the language under critque was FORTRAN, unfortunately today, obscures the underlying truths they were discussing.
Kernighan sounds like he applies this kind of perspective to computers. From what I've read, for all the flame wars about Perl vs. Python, Vi vs. Emacs, *NIX vs. Windows, etc, the "monks" in these groups seem to be much more focused on the commonalities among systems rather than the differences between one and another. Kernighan talks about all the languages and operating systems he uses; Larry Wall gleefully puts the best of every language he can get his paws on into Perl; Guido van Rossum doesn't seem to object to letting a future version of Python run on top of Perl6's Parrot runtime engine; Craig Mundie has no fear preaching the Microsoft word at the Open Source Conference; and Tim O'Reilly tells people that he gets along well with all the people he has met at Microsoft.
I think that's wisdom.
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