A brief interview with Awk creator Dr. Brian Kernighan

Little known random Brian Kernighan facts:

* He joined Princeton’s CS department in 2000 but taught at least one class there as early as 1993 while still at Bell Labs Research (on sabbatical?)

* One of his students regularly brought a 386sx laptop (running pre-1.0 Linux) to class and when Brian was asked more obscure questions about what awk did which he couldn’t remember, the student would run commands in awk and feed Brian the definitive implementation answer. So Brian had some exposure to Linux moderately early on.

* Here’s a writeup from him on putting AT&T’s toll free phone directory on the internet back in fall 1994: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/800.html

Lex Fridman did a good hour and a half interview with BK if you're interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9upVbGSBFo

There's a more comprehensive interview that also includes Aho and Weinberger in the book Masterminds of Programming. Highly recommended

i've been reading the unix programming environment from 01983 this week (the old testament of kernighan and pike), about 35 years later than i really should have. awk is really one of the stars of the book, the closest thing in it to currently popular languages like js, lua, python, perl, or tcl. (what awk calls 'associative arrays' js just calls 'objects'.)

the 7th edition unix version of awk from 01979 https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/aw... (from https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Henry_Sp...) is only 2680 lines of source code, which is pretty astonishing. the executable is 46k and ran in the pdp-11's 64k address space. as far as i can tell, that version of awk, and also the one documnted four years later in tupe, didn't even have user-defined functions. neither did the v7 version of the bourne shell, i think

bc, however, did

Years ago, somebody had as his Usenet .sig line "perl is margarine, awk is butter" (unless the order was reversed). Whatever Perl's many faults, I used awk a good deal less after I discovered Perl.

I own a copy of K&R that is signed by Dr Kernighan from an Australian Unix conference back in the 80s. One of my prized possessions.

That book, along with The Practice of Programming by Kernighan/Pike and Byte magazine etc were my "Stack Overflow" for the 1980s.

It's interesting to me that he refers to association arrays as "newish", when they showed up in Lisp nearly 20 years earlier.

I'm very taken with the regex to lex to yacc to awk sequence of developments. There's a very convincing sense of building on prior work to achieve more general results.

People will hate me for saying this, but I bet there are many many repos on github written by programmers that are better than all these coding legends. Back then, it was a much smaller pool.

Awk Creator: funny!

Very brief

Describing the K of K&R as "Awk creator" is like describing Einstein as a "refrigerator engineer".

I know the title said brief, but it still took me by surprise that there were only three questions.