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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?
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?
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.
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?
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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