Brian Kernighan
Brian Wilson Kernighan ({{pronEng|ˈkɛrn
ɪhæn}}, the 'g' is silent), (born 1942,
Toronto,
Ontario,
Canada) is a
computer scientist who worked at
Bell Labs alongside
Unix creators
Ken Thompson and
Dennis Ritchie and contributed greatly to Unix and its school of thought. He is also coauthor of the
AWK and
AMPL programming languages. The 'K' of
K&R C and the 'K' in
AWK both stand for 'Kernighan'.Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the
C programming language with
Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan has said that he had no part in the design of the C language ("it's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work"). He authored many
Unix programs, including
ditroff.In collaboration with
Shen Lin he devised well-known heuristics for two
NP-complete optimization problems:
graph partitioning and the
travelling salesman problem. (In a display of authorial equity, the former is usually called the
Kernighan-Lin algorithm, while the latter is styled
Lin-Kernighan.)Brian was the software editor for Prentice-Hall International. His "Software Tools" series spread the essence of 'C/Unix thinking' with makeovers for BASIC, FORTRAN, and Pascal - and most notably his 'Ratfor' (rational FORTRAN) was put in the public domain.He has said that if stranded on an island with only one programming language it would have to be
C.
(1)Education
He received his
Bachelor's degree in
Engineering Physics from the
University of Toronto. He received his PhD in
electrical engineering from
Princeton University, where he has held a professorship in the department of computer science since 2000. Each fall he teaches a course called "Computers in Our World", which introduces the fundamentals of computing to non-majors.He has on occasion revealed it was his own pun which led to the use of the name 'Unix' (initially 'Unics') for the operating system
Ken Thompson and
Dennis Ritchie were working on.
Summary of Achievements
- Hello, world, a program originally written by Brian Kernighan of Bell Labs in "A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B" weblink.
- The AWK programming language, along with Al Aho and Peter J. Weinberger, and its book The AWK Programming Language
- The AMPL programming language
- The Elements of Programming Style, with P. J. Plauger
- Ratfor, along with P. J. Plauger
- Software Tools, a book and set of tools for Ratfor, cocreated in part with P. J. Plauger
- Software Tools in Pascal, a book and set of tools for PASCAL, with P. J. Plauger
- The Unix Programming Environment, a tutorial book along with Rob Pike
- The C Programming Language along with C creator Dennis Ritchie, the first ever book on C
- The pic typesetting language for troff
- The eqn typesetting language for troff, along with Lorinda Cherry
- The Practice of Programming, with Rob Pike
- Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language, a popular criticism of the Pascal programming language by Niklaus Wirth. Some parts of the criticism are obsolete due to ISO 7185 (Programming Languages - Pascal), the criticism was written before ISO 7185 was even created. See below for a link. (AT&T Computing Science Technical Report 100)
- ditroff, or "device independent troff", which allowed troff to be used with any device
- The m4 macro processing language, with Dennis Ritchie
Writings
References
-
[An Interview with Brian Kernighan]
External links
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