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Interview With Brian Kernighan of AWK/AMPL Fame
Reader oranghutan brings us another in Computerworld's series of interviews with icons of the programming world, this one with Brian Kernighan, who helped popularize C with his book (co-written with the creator Dennis Ritchie) The C Programming Language, and contributed to the development of AWK and AMPL. In the past we've chewed over a few other interviews in this series, including those with Martin Odersky on Scala and Larry Wall on perl. "In this interview, Brian Kernighan shares his tips for up-and-coming programmers and his thoughts on Ruby, Perl, and Java. He also discusses whether the classic book The Practice of Programming, co-written with Rob Pike, needs an update. He highlights Bill and Melinda Gates as two people doing great things for the world enabled through computer science. Some quotes: 'A typical programmer today spends a lot of time just trying to figure out what methods to call from some giant package and probably needs some kind of IDE like Eclipse or XCode to fill in the gaps. There are more languages in regular use and programs are often distributed combinations of multiple languages. All of these facts complicate life, though it's possible to build quite amazing systems quickly when everything goes right.' 'Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia.'"
Not the Brian Kernighan of "The C Programming Language" fame, then?
If a programmer needs to use an IDE, as opposed to just using one for convenience, something is very wrong.
Once you cover the basic needs of food and shelter, everything after that becomes a convenience
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I need an IDE to do my job. I could lay out graphical forms by hand, but it would take long enough as to not be profitable.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
This is frickin slashdot. Who here needs an introduction of Brian Kernighan?
Bullshit, you only make this argument based on your comfort zones and your levels of trust.
When you write code in a language that is not machine code you require some sort of text editor, you require some sort of file system for organizing your text files, and you require a compiler and a linker for making executables out of your human-readable code.You need to trust that all your tools actually do what they're supposed to do, and you need to be comfortable in that environment.
An IDE is simply one more tool in the chain that might organize your files differently, that might automatically invoke your compiler, and that might automatically highlight and analyze your code for your benefit. It's still just tools in the chain, and you still need to trust them. An IDE does not bring anything fundamentally different.
You only make your argument that an IDE is unnecessary because you are comfortable not using one, and because you probably don't trust them. And from that you argue that "real programmers" shouldn't use an IDE, because you don't, and you consider yourself a "real programmer".
However, I might as well make the argument that "real programmers" don't need text editors or compilers or linkers. How can you trust your compiler, hm? No way, a programmer should be able to enter machine code directly, and that text editor and compiler should only be for convenience, not necessity. And get off my lawn!
But that argument is of course stupid, text editors and compilers and higher level languages add to the productivity of the programmer, in the same way that IDEs add to the productivity of the programmer. Not using the best tools available is just stupid masochism.
Then again, in 10 or 20 years there will be something on top of IDEs that make them look as primitive as a simple text editor does to Eclipse, and I'll probably be whining about the young folks and their newfangled thingies, and I won't trust them, because my comfort level is in an IDE as we know them today. Hopefully, I'll not be as old and stuck in my ways as you are though.
I think you draw the line when a language "requires" an IDE so bloated that it runs slow on a Core 2 Duo machine, and makes you want to code in Notepad instead, except you can't because the language is too convoluted.
Bullshit, you only make this argument based on your comfort zones and your levels of trust.
Profanity, straw-man, pseudo-psychology.
When you write code in a language that is not machine code you require some sort of text editor, you require some sort of file system for organizing your text files, and you require a compiler and a linker for making executables out of your human-readable code.You need to trust that all your tools actually do what they're supposed to do, and you need to be comfortable in that environment.
Appeal to the obvious.
An IDE does not bring anything fundamentally different.
Opinion presented as fact.
You only make your argument that an IDE is unnecessary because you are comfortable not using one,
Straw man.
and because you probably don't trust them.
Straw man.
And from that you argue that "real programmers" shouldn't use an IDE, because you don't, and you consider yourself a "real programmer".
Changing the content of parent comment.
However, I might as well make the argument that "real programmers" don't need text editors or compilers or linkers. How can you trust your compiler, hm? No way, a programmer should be able to enter machine code directly, and that text editor and compiler should only be for convenience, not necessity.
Extending parent's position to absurdity.
And get off my lawn!
Ad hominem.
But that argument is of course stupid, text editors and compilers and higher level languages add to the productivity of the programmer, in the same way that IDEs add to the productivity of the programmer. Not using the best tools available is just stupid masochism.
Ridiculous comparison between programming languages and GUI widgets.
Then again, in 10 or 20 years there will be something on top of IDEs that make them look as primitive as a simple text editor does to Eclipse, and I'll probably be whining about the young folks and their newfangled thingies, and I won't trust them, because my comfort level is in an IDE as we know them today.
Unjustified extrapolation.
Hopefully, I'll not be as old and stuck in my ways as you are though.
Ad hominem.
I'm looking forward to languages that integrate completely with an IDE, and leave simple character representation (ASCII e.a.) behind.
Oh, me too! I can't wait until diff and patch no longer work, and every version control system has to explicitly support every distinct language, and examples on Stack Overflow are files you have to download and open in an IDE before you can examine them, and Google has to learn each language's binary serialization so that it can search code snippets.
In a time when every other type of file is moving to standardized formats, I just love the idea of my industry balkanizing into a million crap representations. That is certain to make us all more productive.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
1) Uh, since when did the nature of a language dictate how fast/slow an IDE implementation is?
2) Why, dear god, would a slow IDE be evidence that a language sucks?
3) What language are you using that is "too convoluted" to use outside of an IDE? Because I've used quite a few, and I've yet to come across *any* language that "requires" an IDE.
That platform arrived in the 70's and it was called Smalltalk. All current mouse-based GUI systems are an offshoot of the original Smalltalk system. Wiki link. In reference to your dream-system, things like this were pretty potent and ahead of their time:
This would obviously allow you to edit your IDE/OS in real-time/at runtime.
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