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."

Comments

Correct AMPL link

[JohnGrahamCumming]

The story has a link to ampl.org, the correct link is ampl.com.

John.

Woah

[Sir Haxalot]

'...and how he had nothing to do with the creation of C'
That's something to be proud of!

Re:Woah

[jmt9581]

I'd be more proud of having nothing to do with C++. :)

Hey, we have something in common!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had nothing to do with the creation of C either!

If I were Brian...

[stevens]

...and someone asked me about the wisdom of gets(), I'd also be pointing at Dennis Ritchie and yelling, "It was him! Burrrn him!"

Re:If I were Brian...

[Rogerborg]

Huh, I consider gets to be a minor (!) snafu compared to the vile mind poison of:

int foo, *bar;

And the way that C interprets type modifiers as right to left except that any modifiers on the far left to the first type. Gnnn.

If I had a penny for every time I'd seen developers failing to completely understand C types because of this, I'd be handing my wet towels to Bill Gates.

Re:If I were Brian...

[thogard]

The 1st gets was based on a
while(*buf++=getchar())
type of loop
Once the preprocessor got more goodies, and STDIO was cleaned up, it became:
#define gets(x) fgets(x,BUFSIZ,stdin)
So in the days when there were only 100 or so Unix sites you could declare strings with
char buf[BUFSIZ];
and you couldn't overflow it.

Re:If I were Brian...

[AlecC]

int foo, *bar; creates an integer named foo, and a pointer to an int named bar. Right? Or am I wrong?

So you have one declaration line which created variables of two totally disinct types. Fine for the opriginal creator, lousy for the maintainer, who sees a line declaring ints and had to do a serious double take to find that some of them are actually pointers. Abuse further as

int foo, *bar, flash, *bang, up, *down, left, *right;

Without reading the line again, what was the type of "up"?

And as for the other, 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.

The mistake I would junk is allowing enum {fred=36, bill=19, joe=333} ; Which confuses predefined constants with the classic enumeration. The cost saving of a lookup table to convert the 0, 1, 2 sequence is tiny, and the knock on effects are horrible.

Re:If I were Brian...

[ajs]

You are exactly correct, and I have no idea what the original poster's problem with it was.

[ajs@put /tmp]$ cat > /tmp/c.c
#include <stdio.h>
void
main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
int i, *j;
i = 1;
*j = 2;
printf("i=%d, j=%d\n", i, *j);
exit(0);
}
[ajs@put /tmp]$ gcc -o /tmp/c-test /tmp/c.c
/tmp/c.c: In function `main':
/tmp/c.c:3: warning: return type of `main' is not `int'
[ajs@put /tmp]$ /tmp/c-test
i=1, j=2

Perhaps he was thinking of "int *i, j" which isn't all that bad in terms of confusion until you started seeing stroustrup's style, which I *hated* from day one of, "int* i" which of course lead to people using, "int* i, j".

You can write badly obfuscated code by abusing visual association in just about every language, but this particular gotcha should have tipped off Stroustrup VERY early on that his style was agegeously misleading, and a good technical editor should never have let him publish a book with such incomprehensible gibberish.

That very thing is one of the primary reasons I didn't use C++ for years (not to mention that I regretted it when I did). My thinking was that if the creator of the language didn't see how damaging it was to introduce confusion in his published writing, then he wasn't likely to avoid such in a programming language. I think ANSI C++ stands as a monument to the correctness of my thinking on that point!

Re:If I were Brian...

[rot26]

int foo, *bar, flash, *bang, up, *down, left, *right; Without reading the line again, what was the type of "up"?

I'm not disagreeing with your point, but the acceptable (if not great) solution is to choose your variable names more wisely.

int Foo, *pBar, Flash, *pBang, Up, *pDown, etc;

Re:If I were Brian...

[parc]

So yeah, where'd that 2 come from? I'm amused that it actually worked, since you define a pointer, then assign to the dereference of it, which is god-only-knows where.

And void main is deprecated. Don't use it. gcc is nice enough to warn you.

Re:If I were Brian...

[edwdig]

The problem isn't:

int foo, *bar;

The problem is when the C++ people come and insist you put the * by the type instead of by the variable.

int* foo, bar;

That line confuses the hell out of people learning the language. foo is a pointer, bar isn't. That's the big reason I always insist on putting the * by the variable name rather than by the type.

Re:If I were Brian...

[connsmythe96]

The mistake I would junk is allowing enum {fred=36, bill=19, joe=333} ; Which confuses predefined constants with the classic enumeration. The cost saving of a lookup table to convert the 0, 1, 2 sequence is tiny, and the knock on effects are horrible.

The advantage of enums over constants is type checking by the compiler (warnings are issued if you try to assign a constant to a variable declared as an enum) and also warnings issued when you do a switch on an enum (as in switch(enum varBlah)). This might not be true in C, but it is in C++ and I find it useful. It's merely a convenience. It has no effect on code output.

I've found that enums in other languages which enforce the sequential order and must start at 0 are pretty much useless in most cases.

Re:If I were Brian...

[BlueWonder]

Huh, I consider gets to be a minor (!) snafu compared to the vile mind poison of:

int foo, *bar;

Why? It is perfectly possible to write a C program that contains int foo, *bar; and performs correctly for all inputs. The same is not true for a C program that calls gets.

Re:If I were Brian...

[muffel]

int Foo, *pBar, Flash, *pBang, Up, *pDown, etc;

yuk. I can only agree with what Linux says in "CodingStyle":

C is a Spartan language, and so should your naming be. Unlike Modula-2 and Pascal programmers, C programmers do not use cute names like ThisVariableIsATemporaryCounter. A C programmer would call that variable "tmp", which is much easier to write, and not the least more difficult to understand.
[...]
Encoding the type of a function into the name (so-called Hungarian notation) is brain damaged - the compiler knows the types anyway and can check those, and it only confuses the programmer. No wonder MicroSoft makes buggy programs.

Re:If I were Brian...

[smittyoneeach]

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.

Re:If I were Brian...

[Zan Zu from Eridu]

So what is wrong with:

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.

Re:If I were Brian...

[DunbarTheInept]

And what about this, then:
int pFoo, *Bar;

Which falsely labels pFoo as a pointer and Bar as not a pointer, when the opposite is true? How's THAT for confusing. The problem with encoding type name with the variable is that it now means there are two seperate ways where you "define" the type - the one for the compiler's benefit and the one for the human reader's benefit. Since they are totally independant of each other, they can disagree - leading to no end of confusion. I much prefer coming up with a solution where the human-readable version and the compiler-readable version are guaranteed to actually agree. If that cannot be done, then you are better off forcing the human reader to look at the same thing the compiler looks at, rather than inventing a fake mnemonic that has no guarantee of being correct after several hands have been involved mantaining the code.

The only such naming mnemonic I use is ones that label the storage scope, as in g_foo means "global foo", and s_foo means "local stack foo", and h_foo means "heap foo". This mnemonic just helps the reader figure out where to look for the declaration of the variable, without telling him what that declaration actually is.

Re:If I were Brian...

[PD]

Hungarian notation is evil, essentially because it doesn't help the compiler, and it hinders the human programmer. The chunks of letters between two spaces are called words, and if they correspond to words we already know, we recognise them faster. In so many places we've discovered that overloading meanings into a single coded word is a bad idea (think databases). It's no fun trying to decipher a database field that looks like "A45T9923OT" into a thing called "department A4 (paper size) palate T, 99th stack, page 23, Out of the warehouse, on the Truck. Similarly, the type and the name of a variable should be kept completely separate.

Re:If I were Brian...

[ajs]

He was pointing out (rightly so) my lack of malloc. I was assigning to empty space.

Re:If I were Brian...

[James Lanfear]

You could also look at it like the pointer j is being assigned the address where the literal 2 is stored.

No, you couldn't. *j dereferences an uninitialized pointer, which plunges the program into the dark realm of undefined behavior. If j accidentally happened to hold a valid value, and if the compiler saw fit to actually store a 2 somewhere that could be pointed to, then maybe it would appear to work, but you may as well be relying of cosmic rays to flip bits for you.

Do youself a favor a pick up a copy of the standard, or a book, or anything.

Re:If I were Brian...

[Ed Avis]

The C++ people have some justification for putting the * next to the type name, because of C++'s references.

string &x;

&x is a string? Huh? How can the address of x be a string? Of course & does not really mean address-of in the above line, it means a reference to the type.

string& x;
string* x;

Not great, and pretty bad when you have multiple declarations on the same line, but probably better. Stroustrup gives his reasons for preferring this second style.

SCO sueing Brian Kernighan

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't SCO already suing Brian, both for being involved in a Linux OS, and because "C" happens to be found in the middle of SCO's trademark name?

Re:It's official

[Lazar Dobrescu]

It is well known that Kernigham had nothing to do with the creation of C. The K&R you are referring too are the authors of the BOOK, "The C Programming Language", that Kernigham wrote with Dennis Ritchie(which is the main inventor of C).

So, we still have K&R, just as before. Only now, maybe some readers understand better that K&R is not the names of the C inventors, but the name of the people who wrote the book about how to use C ;)

Re:BWK

[JohnGrahamCumming]

The book you are referring to:

The Practice of Programming
Kerningham and Pike
Addison-Wesley, 1999

is a classic text and it's very clearly written. The front cover sums up in three words the core philosophy of the entire book:

Simplicity
Clarity
Generality

It is a delight to read although it uses C/C++ as the example language everywhere and tends, therefore, to be a little C oriented, although there are examples in other languages.

Much of the material will be familiar to people who've done a CS degree (e.g. trees, O-notation, etc.) but the section on testing is very worthwhile if you are planning to write code that will last a long time.

John.

expressive

[rnd()]

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)?

Re:expressive

[garcia]

vuglar language.

Flash video of Monty Python's famous skit ;)

Re:expressive

[ryants]

what you think the most expressive language is (efficiency aside)?

Chinese. In no other language can one syllable mean anything from "chicken" to "the interlocking fates of all beings in the celestial orb".

And let's not forget crisitunity.

Re:expressive

[GnuVince]

Lisp and Smalltalk are two VERY good languages at being very expressive. And both are old enough to have had enough research that they are now as fast as C++.

Re:expressive

[leoboiko]

Lisp. See "Succinctness is Power".

Re:expressive

[IamTheRealMike]

Well, define "expressive" first, then maybe people will be able to give better answers....

Re:expressive

[nat5an]

I'd have to agree. I was taking a grad level course on programming language foundations, and the prof did the famous sieve of erasthones in one line (well two lines, since you have to call the sieve function from somewhere) in Haskell:

f (h:t) = h : f [ x | x <- t, x 'mod' h /= 0]
main = f [2..]

The only reason it's possible is due to Haskell's lazy evaluation, so you can have infinite recursion defining a list, and it's not really a problem, unless you try to grab every member of the infinite list and use its value.

Well, I was impressed. You all may be jaded.

Re:expressive

[swordgeek]

Forth.

After years of basic, fortran, 6502 assembler, pascal, and probably something else that I've forgotten, forth was magical. Still is.

Re:expressive

[turgid]

And both are old enough to have had enough research that they are now as fast as C++.
I suppose that all depends of the compilers and interpreters involved.

Re:expressive

[jfengel]

You've got to be careful with your terminology here. All languages are equally expressive in the sense that anything you compute in one can be written in another. (At least in terms of computability. Access to hardware is a different matter.)

In your context, you might mean "expressive" in the sense of "saying as much in as few words as possible." Since C is a typed languge with explicit memory management, it's going to be more verbose than an untyped garbage-collecting language like Lisp or Perl. (Well, they have very limited typing, especially once you start adding constructs on top of the core language.)

Or you could mean "expressive" in exactly the opposite sense, where you have to be more "expressive" about the types of things. In this sense C is far less expressive than strongly typed languages like Haskell or even C++/Java.

Or you could simply be referring to the verbosity of the language, where COBOL holds the title of most ugly language and APL is without a doubt the shortest. (APL is indistinguishable from line noise.)

In the end the value of a "language" has less to do with the core language and much to do with the libraries for hardware access (memory, screen, disk, network) and compatibility with common features provided by the OS (clipboard, windowing, etc.)

So you pick your language for a host of reasons few of which have anything to do with a core "expressiveness".

Re:expressive

[DunbarTheInept]

But if you don't leave some audio clues *out* of the literal meaning of the language, it is actually less expressive since you can't communicate any 'tone' to what you say. (For example, how do you express "this thing I am saying is sarcastic" or "This thing I am saying makes me happy" in a language where you cannot change the tone of your voice without having it end up being a totally different word?)

Re:expressive

[Circuit Breaker]

In the Turing sense, all languages have equivalent expressiveness.

In the Kolmogorov sense, the "complexity" of a program differs between two languages by at most a bounded constant (the length of the interpreter of one language in the other).

But in the real world, I think K (http://kx.com) beats any other language in terseness (and is speedwise competitive with C as well). Rebol is also amazingly terse, even if not as fast.

Re:It's official

[no reason to be here]

wrote with Dennis Ritchie(which is the main inventor of C).

<nazi class="grammar">
First off, which is in the wrong case. which is the objective case. It should be the nominative form, that.
Second, that/which is the wrong word. Dennis Ritchis is a person, and therefore should be substituted by the pronoun who (not whom, as that would cause that same nominative/objective problem again).
</nazi>

He teaches VB!

[Anonymous Coward]

Brian K is a really nice guy, it seemed to me. Another gift of the city of Toronto and the University of Toronto to humanity! I heard him talk at UofT a year or two ago. It seems he teaches Visual Basic in his programming course at Princeton. I'm a C nut so that came as a shock to me. Still, I really admire the guy.

Re:He teaches VB!

[$rtbl_this]

I'm a C nut...

Just be glad you're not dyslexic as well. :)

Re:He teaches VB!

[__past__]

It seems he teaches Visual Basic in his programming course at Princeton. I'm a C nut so that came as a shock to me.

Well, he certainly is in good company.

Great people are so humble!

[civilengineer]

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!

he's dead wrong about MS

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate it when somebody smart that i respect in one domain, says something stupid about another domain:

Like many people, I have mixed feelings about Microsoft. They have done much good for the world, producing a common environment that has enabled a lot of creative people to build new software and hardware and sell it at reasonable prices. Microsoft's work has made computing accessible to a huge population who would otherwise not be able to use computers.

listen folks: Microsoft did not bring computers to the masses. Computers were well on their way to the masses through the fine works of the many many other people in the computer industry.

Microsoft has held computers back from the masses. Monopolies charge unreasonably high prices. High prices stop people from buying things. A grindingly competitive software industry would have delivered many more computers to many more people and businesses.

Microsoft has harmed us all, and the world economy, immeasureably, by much more than the money they've pocketed for themselves.

stick to CS, Brian, it's something you're good at.

Re:he's dead wrong about MS

[SDPlaya]

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?

Re:he's dead wrong about MS

[CdnYoda]

Hmmm...sounds like someone from the Dark Side. Of course MS prices are outrageous! They don't even include the source! :-)

Re:he's dead wrong about MS

[DunbarTheInept]

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.

Re:Points in article:

[DogIsMyCoprocessor]

Why'd they interview him?

Let's see ...

• He invented Awk, a spiritual godfather to Perl
• He co-authored The C Programming Language
• He co-authored The UNIX Programming Environment
• He co-authored Software Tools, an early manifesto of the "Unix Way" of using small, interoperable tools.

If you had done as much important work, I think you would be worthy of an interview, too. That's no guarantee that you'd have much to say, of course.

Re:FreeBSD on his Mac?

[pohl]

Can't speak for Mr. Ritchie, of course, but it could be that he was refering to the FreeBSD 4.4 built into MacOS X

Re:Points in article:

[Urkki]

Well, some of your points:

1. He says the graphical interfaces for running java are more responsive on Windows than X, not that everything is. You take that out of context, and in the process invite flame war Win vs X...

3. You are inviting a flame war Lisp vs C. They are very different languages to start with, and both have "loyal followers", one of the best recipes for flame war.

That's why your first post comes through as flamebait, and 2nd post comes through as a troll trying to draw more attention to your first flamebait.

(And btw, I didn't moderate it, this is just my impression.)

Re:Points in article:

[tommasz]

Awk and those three books were the basis of my early career and I would think had the most impact on my thoughts and programming style. Not quite the philosophy of programming, but darned close. I'm still advocating the use of small, interoperable tools in my current work, even though I no longer do the programming.

Some ideas are just right.

Simplicity

[devphil]

One of my favorite Kernighan quotes of all time:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Atleast Windows is safe.

[Niadh]

... since C is now owned by SCO, so is everything written in said language

That explains why SCO isn't going after Microsoft.
Windows being written in VB and all.

overthrow the style oppressor

[smarthippy]

nothing to do with the creation of C? then why am i supposed to be using his coding style?! hrmph. i'll put my {}'s where i damn well please, now that the ugly truth has come to light.

main() {
for(;;) {
printf("suck it!"); } }

Holy shit, batman, where's your flame-proof suit??

[Rinikusu]

Let's see:
1) He mentions he writes interfaces for.. Visual Basic
2) He mentions he writes code in Java
3) He mentions Microsoft in a positive light
4) He admits to owning a Mac

Fuck, man, the only thing he didn't do is say "vi" or "emacs".

Does this mean that, in reality, all of the contention regarding languages, operating systems, and idealogies is completely artificial and that we should really just use what we like instead of jumping on a particular bandwagon and denying the legitimacy of anything else?

Man, I think I want to go back to bed.

Re:It's official

[connsmythe96]

I've found that most people in my classes who can't program have never even heard of the K&R book, and would probably be hard-pressed to tell you who K&R are. I guess the book can only help if people read it. ;)

Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language

[NearlyHeadless]

Here's an HTML version of Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language. There's a Postscript version on Kernighan's website

totally. I like this guy.

[rebelcool]

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.

Re:totally. I like this guy.

[asciiRider]

It seems to me that alot of "propaganda" and silly things like win32 vs. unix vs. whatever really aren't about the tools themselves, or what the tools can acomplish.

Sometimes the debates are about the design of the tools.

I'm pretty sure the Slashdot crowd, given 2 hammers that work well, can argue on and on about which one is "better." Once they've convinced you that one is designed better than the other, they will go on to say "By the way, your poorly designed hammer will do a fine job for you."

Design and Function are two different things, yet when the debates happen, they often get all mixed up together. Pretty neat to see some of the debates play out anyway though...

Re:Mac running Linux problems

[j0l]

Umm just one quick question you say that you're running Linux on a Mac; there is no version of BBedit that runs on Linux. Unless you are doing something strange like running it through MOL

Re:Holy shit, batman, where's your flame-proof sui

[machine of god]

You read the article didn't you. DIDN'T YOU. Never do that again.

(It led you to assume that the rest of slashdot will.)

these guys

[Anonymous Coward]

My aunt used to work with these guys at the Labs here in NJ quite often. Shes dieing now and we sit for hours and talk about how she used to program in C and how much she loved unix. Hours on end of stories about these guys and different projects. I work with a guy now who worked with her, lots of stories from him as well. Awesome stuff, true geniuses. Gotta thank these guys for changing the world.

-- chris

http://elusive.filetap.com

VB and Kernighan's course

[Serf]

Isn't it odd that I'd recommend to people who want to become programmers to avoid taking Brian Kerningham's class?

I know people who have taken his classes. I live with one of them (a CS type), and used to live with another (a non-CS type). All of them have nothing but good things to say about Kernighan's classes.

The class in which he teaches VB is oriented towards non-CS types, and, from what I saw of my former roommate's coursework, I can't imagine a better course to give people who are basically computer illiterate SOME idea of just what goes on inside the magic box, and some familiarity with all the issues surrounding information technology (legal, ethical, etc. ... like what you see on Slashdot every day). It's not just a programming course -- it covers pretty much every aspect of the field of computing and its related subjects, though in somewhat limited depth.

Complaining about VB's namespace problems in this context is like bitching about giving a toddler a tricycle because he'll never win the Tour de France on anything with three wheels. My former roommate had no problems with his programming assignments that he wouldn't have had in any other language, and, judging from what I've seen of people trying to pick up C and Java for the first time, VB is a far better choice of language for a course that aims to give people a flavor of what computers are all about.

Re:VB and Kernighan's course

[Serf]

I'd like to agree that Python would be better, since I'm partial to the language myself, but I really don't know enough about VB to say.

But ...

It's boneheaded design that will turn the toddler off biking completely.

The reaction of the people taking the course seemed to be, "hey, this programming stuff isn't so bad after all." They only did the simplest of tasks (can't quite remember what any more), and VB ended up being quite sufficient. Of course, you're be correct in thinking that very, very few of them will go on to be programmers. But I'm don't think you can blame that on either the language or the course: none of them were inclined that way to begin with.

So, yes, VB may not lay the best foundation for learning other languages, and it may not be a good tool for serious development, but it seems to get non-techie types past their fear of programming just fine.

I'd suspect that Kernighan considered other languages for the course. He probably even considered Python. It would be interesting to hear what, specifically, his reasons for choosing VB over (languages x, y, z) were.

Slashdot should retitle the article

[Comatose51]

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.

It's a shared feeling...

[Comatose51]

I'm sure most programmers, deep down inside, feel the same way. Windows is the undisputed king of the desktops. It is just easier to use Windows than most other OSes. No one can deny its role in popularizing computers. What drove some of us nuts is that it crashed a lot and some of the practices of MS. With Windows 2000, the first complain really quiet down a lot.

Re:It's a shared feeling...

[Arandir]

It is just easier to use Windows than most other OSes.

Correction. It is just easier to use Windows software under Windows than most other OSes. But beyond that it's actually pretty mediocre.

Compare the individual components of Windows to their counterparts in the UNIX world. Compare *just* the window manager part (not the desktop) to Blackbox. Blackbox is easier to use. You can easily control the z-order of windows, snap to window or screen borders, etc., making it very easy to organize your windows on the screen. Now compare *just* the desktop part (not the window manager) to the KDesktop. Under KDE you can use any damn image you want as the wallpaper, and scale it smoothly. You can align you icons to a grid. Multiple desktops are a given. Etc. Now look at task bars. Kicker and Panel kick butt over the Windows taskbar.

People who have never used any other system always say that Windows is easier than anything else they've tried. And there are so many of them, that people who HAVE used other systems tend to believe them. But it's just not true. It just seems that way because it's what you're used to. Spend a couple of week using something other than Windows, then go back. You'll be surprised.

p.s. I've never used XP, so it may be a different story, but even CDE seems usable compared to Win9x/NT/2K.

I, Parasite

[handy_vandal]

I'm sure most programmers, deep down inside, feel the same way. Windows is the undisputed king of the desktops. It is just easier to use Windows than most other OSes. No one can deny its role in popularizing computers.

All True.

What's more, I make a decent living off of Microsoft's products -- and like a good parasite, I don't actually harm my host.

Only two real problems in computing?

[kbeer]

In the interview KR said:

There are only two real problems in computing: computers are too hard to use and too hard to program.

Does everyone buy this? What about issues of availability and maintainability? How about:

There are three real problems in computing: computers are too hard to use, too hard to program and too hard to administer.

Re:Only two real problems in computing?

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

Maybe he considers maintenance and administration under the "too hard to use" category...

Re:FreeBSD on his Mac?

[IamTheRealMike]

If you mean the "FreeBSD" userspace, then maybe, but I've yet to see anybody argue convincingly that MacOS X is actually "freebsd with stuff on top". It has a different kernel, different IO layer, the FreeBSD de-facto graphics layer is X11 not Quartz, and so on. Calling MacOS FreeBSD is like calling Windows with Cygwin Linux. I think this guy knows the difference ;)

Re:FreeBSD on his Mac?

[pohl]

It's true that there is the Mach kernel involved (here's a simplified cake-layer diagram), but from the context that Ritchie provides ("The way I use them, which is as a casual programmer, it doesn't matter--they are all the same...") none of that is really relevant. The APIs that he expects from a unix are there in the FreeBSD 4.4 code layer. (X11 is there too, by the way). He would have to be using the word "FreeBSD" very pedantically to mean that it's FreeBSD/PPC and not the FreeBSD 4.4 in OSX. It doesn't sound like he's being pedantic in this interview.

The third problem

[lscotte]

I would argue administer==use

Or perhaps more accurately:

If it was easy to use, we wouldn't have to administer it. My microwave has a 'puter in it. It's easy to use, and I don't have to administer it.

Actually, he is right.

[RatBastard]

While MS is overpriced and abusive today, historically they did lower the bar for entrance into the computer realm. Befor MS-DOS and Windows, every brand of computer used its own OS (if you want to consider ROM-BASIC an OS) and software had to be rewritten for each platform.

With MS having the forsight and balls to reserve the ownership of MS-DOS and grant IBM a license they opened the doot to one OS running on machines manufactured by multiple venders.

Consider that when your average PC cost $4,000.00 (US) (not the high-end systems, average desktop systems), MS-DOS was only around $120.00 - $150.00 a copy. Compaired to the multi-thousand dollar cost of even the cheapest Unix systems of the day DOS was a bargain! Sure, it lacked a lot of what makes Unix so great, but it had enough to let people run their entire businesses on their desktops.

Remember, before Linux came into being, Unix (and it's clones, dirivatives, etc...) was an expensive and very closed environment.

Re:Points in article:

[sdowney]

He also co-authored The Elements of Programming Style with P.J.Plauger, and early classic on how, and how not, to program.

The fact that the language under critque was FORTRAN, unfortunately today, obscures the underlying truths they were discussing.

What an embarrassing interview

[afabbro]

"What were the AWK and AMPL languages designed for?"

"Brian, what do you think of UNIX? Is it a good and reliable platform for development?"

"Is it true that you suggested the name "UNIX" for the long ago OS, Multics? What does that word mean?"

"What are your hobbies? Reading? Sports?"

"Could you say that you love computers (IT)?"

Etc. What a waste of a good man's time.

Nearly all the interview questions are either (a) things widely available in the literature (as in FAQs, not digging research - did the interviewer really not know what AWK stood for? If so, shame on him), or (b) idiotic questions that I might ask if I was interviewing a 6th grader.

If you can't think of anything interesting to ask your subject, don't bother with the interview!

Re:Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Langu

[marhar]

I should note here that the Borland Object Pascal language has dealt with nearly all of the problems presented in the paper...

Pascal's main problem is that nearly every "real world" implementation of Pascal has dealt with the problems presented in the paper, Unfortunately in different and incompatible ways.

Re:Holy shit, batman, where's your flame-proof sui

[babbage]

In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell talks about how among pretty much all religions, the laity & clergy get caught up in how their religion is better than all the others (the classical religious wars). However, most of these religions have a mystical wing -- monks, yogis, etc -- and in general the members of these groups are much more willing to reach out to the other groups and not try to paint things in terms of "us vs. them".

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.