#109 – Brian Kernighan: UNIX, C, AWK, AMPL, and Go Programming

Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University. He co-authored the C Programming Language with Dennis Ritchie (creator of C) and has written a lot of books on programming, computers, and life including the Practice of Programming, the Go Programming Language, his latest UNIX: A History and a Memoir. He co-created AWK, the text processing language used by Linux folks like myself. He co-designed AMPL, an algebraic modeling language for large-scale optimization.

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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

OUTLINE:
00:00– Introduction
04:24– UNIX early days
22:09– Unix philosophy
31:54– Is programming art or science?
35:18– AWK
42:03– Programming setup
46:39– History of programming languages
52:48– C programming language
58:44– Go language
1:01:57– Learning new programming languages
1:04:57– Javascript
1:08:16– Variety of programming languages
1:10:30– AMPL
1:18:01– Graph theory
1:22:20– AI in 1964
1:27:50– Future of AI
1:29:47– Moore’s law
1:32:54– Computers in our world
1:40:37– Life