Brian Kernighan

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/

Pronounced Kernihan (the "g" is silent).

BrianKernighan is the "K" of "K&R" or KernighanAndRitchie, authors of the classic book on the CeeLanguage, The C Programming Language. He's also done a LOT of other work over the years, almost all of it worth finding out about... maybe at: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/index.html

I thought that BrianKernighan and DennisRitchie were the inventors of C and Unix, respectively. That's a lot more important than writing a book about C.

• You thought wrong.
  • DennisRitchie inventor of C,
  • KenThompson inventor of Unix
  • BrianKernighan inventor/coauthor of a book called The C Programming Language (KernighanAndRitchie).

He and RobPike are the authors of ThePracticeOfProgramming and TheUnixProgrammingEnvironment.

With Aho and Weinberger, he wrote TheAwkProgrammingLanguage in 1988 which remains the most concise description of the AwkLanguage and a brief introduction to ComputerScience.

A collection of interviews with Brian Kernighan: http://genius.cat-v.org/brian-kernighan/interviews/

He also wrote the essay WhyPascalIsNotMyFavoriteProgrammingLanguage, which is worth reading even now, 20 years later.

He invented the HelloWorld program.

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Isn't KenThompson also the co-inventor of C? A fundamental concept in UNIX's design is that it's NOT written in assembly, but in a higher level programming language, C.

• Nope. The original versions of Unix were written in PDP-8 assembly language. Rewriting it in C was a purely pragmatic decision, and intrinsically holds no value towards what makes Unix Unix. --SamuelFalvo?

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