#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