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Interview With Brian Kernighan of AWK/AMPL Fame

Posted by kdawson on from the series-of-pipes dept.

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.'"

6 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. The Practice of Programming by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There are a few books I recommend to kids just starting out in the industry.

    Code Complete
    Writing Solid Code
    Programming Pearls
    and The Practice of Programming

    Even old stalwarts like Kernighan's The C Programming Language aren't as useful in the longterm as the 4 books above are.

    Anyone who wants to make the jump from "code monkey" to professional should really take the time to read the books.

    1. Re:The Practice of Programming by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Right. The four books you mentioned aren't books for teaching you about a programming language or a particular technique, unlike K&R, which focuses just on C. They are designed to teach how to think like a programmer and how write code like professional software developer. They are more about the fundamental nature of coding; they're not as much about trying to teach you the basics as they are about trying to teach you what you really need to know to successfully take a programming project through the development cycle as a coder.

      --
      My blog
  2. Brian Kernighan of AWK/AMPL Fame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not the Brian Kernighan of "The C Programming Language" fame, then?

  3. Re:"Need" an IDE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Labview by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There may be a non-character-based program representation (useful for developing and maintaining non-trivial projects) in the future, but I fear we'll all be retired or expired by then

    This has been tried numerous times. It just doesn't work, period.

    More recently, I recall reading an interesting interview with Microsoft "project Oslo" guys. Oslo is supposed to be a DSL framework for .NET. Now, existing releases already have something called "DSL SDK", integrated into VS, but the "DSLs" that it lets you create are purely graphical, like flowcharts, and have to be "coded" using a visual designer.

    That didn't exactly catch on, and Oslo guys explained that one of the most repeated customer feedbacks was that, while visual designers are occasionally useful, in the end it's still faster and easier to spend half an hour training, and then write DSL code as actual text in a text editor. Note: not for a programmer, but for a business analyst, or some other guy who haven't ever seen any code before!

    So they ditched the visual designer idea in Oslo, and instead came up with the tried and proven approach of parser generators (going for LL(*) over LALR as it's simpler to use and less restrictive, even if slower), and coupled it with a text editor that can load a grammar for the parser generator, and automatically provide syntax highlighting and simple completion for it.

  5. Re:"Need" an IDE by spitzak · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm looking forward to languages that ... leave simple character representation (ASCII e.a.) behind.

    I worked on such a thing in 1983 at DEC (look up my MIT thesis to see). Structural editing.

    Conclusion: it was an absolute disaster. Programmers cannot use this. Most of the work was in altering it to be as much like a plain text editor as possible.

    Don't think you have an amazing new idea.