Brian Kernighan uses Python

By Vasudev Ram

This is from the site usesthis.com, a.k.a The Setup :-), which has many interviews of well-known computer (and maybe other) people, about their hardware and software setups (and nowadays device setups too, of course). I've read quite a few of those interviews in the past, and they can be interesting.

Brian Kernighan uses Python. Cool ... [1] [2]

Brian Kernighan page (at Bell Labs)
Brian Kernighan page (at Princeton University)

[1] For those who don't know of Kernighan, he was, at Bell Labs, one of the top contributors to Unix and C (from early on, and for a long time), and is the co-author of the classic computer books "The C Programming Language" (with Dennis Ritchie), also abbreviated as K&R, and "The Unix Programming Environment" (with Rob Pike), abbreviated as K&P. Rob Pike has been working on the Go language for the last few years.

[2] I saw the usesthis.com article about Kernighan via this Reddit thread, which also has some interesting comments.

And I almost forgot to mention, Kernighan also co-invented Awk :-)

I was fortunate to get to read those two books (K&R and K&P) early on in my career. In fact, I should probably say "those four books" or "those six books" :-) because I read them at least twice or thrice. They had a big influence on me, and benefited me a lot in my work over the years, possibly more than any other computer books I've read, before or since then.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Brian Kernighan's home page w/ his articles, books and source code

Brian Kernighan is still one of my favorite computer authors, even after many years.

He is of course very well-known to a lot of software people, but I'm writing this post because there will still be people (particularly people new or recent to software) who don't know about him and his work, and also because of the useful links to his books, below (some of them with downloadable source code).

He is the co-author of the classic books "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie (well-known as just "K&R") and "The UNIX Programming Environment" by Kernighan and Pike. I read both of those books years ago near the beginning of my programming career, and even today I find there are very few books of that caliber - concise yet dense with information, clear writing, etc.

He was one of the early people to work on UNIX and C at Bell Labs, and had made a lot of contributions to many areas.

The AWK programming language is named partly after him - the K is for Kernighan (*).

Brian Kernighan's home page at Princeton University. He is currently a professor there after working at Bell Labs for many years.

Wikipedia page on Brian Kernighan.

Brian Kernighan page at Bell Labs.

(*) And D is for Digital :), the name of a new introductory book on computers (hardware, software and communications) by Kernighan. I just saw it. It looks like a good present for the non-technical person(s) in your life.

There are some interesting articles at Kernighan's pages at Princeton University and Bell Labs (two of the links above).

Also, the pages about his books have links to downloadable source code for some of the programs in those books. See the links below:

The Practice of Programming.

The C Programming Language.

The Unix Programming Environment.

The AWK Programming Language.

Inspired by nature.
- dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com