Brian Kernighan

Brian Wilson Kernighan (/ˈkɜːrnɪhæn/), computer scientist, born in Toronto, Canada in 1942. Known for co-authoring the book The C Programming Language. He worked at Bell Laboratories along with Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, where he helped develop the Unix operating system, programming utilities like ditroff. Kernighan received his BS in physics and engineering from the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University, where since 2000 he has been a professor of computer science.

Although he prefers C to any other language (he said that if he had to take a programming language with him to a desert island, it would have to be C) Kernighan denies any contribution to its design, crediting Dennis Ritchie (& #34;is entirely the work of Dennis Ritchie"). He nevertheless contributed to the creation of other languages such as AWK and AMPL. The "K" of the letters K & R with which his most famous book is known, and the & # 34;K & # 34; from AWK derive from "Kernighan".

Kernighan was also a software editor for Prentice-Hall International. His Software Tools series extended the essence of 'C/Unix thinking', as an improvement over the more established at the time BASIC, FORTRAN, and Pascal.

Summary of achievements

• The programming language AWK, along with Alfred V. Aho and Peter Weinberger, and his book The AWK Programming Language.
• The programming language AMPL.
• The book The Practice of Programming.
• Software Tools, a book and a set of tools for C and Pascal, together with P. J. Plauger.
• The Unix Programming Environmenta tutorial along with Rob Pike.
• The C Programming Languagealong with Dennis Ritchie (Ccreator), who was the first guide to language C.
• The text processing language pic for troff.
• Text processing language eqn for troff.
• The Principles of ProgrammingAlso with Rob Pike.
• Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language, a popular criticism of Pascal language designed by Niklaus Wirth. Some parts of the review have lost validity thanks to the ISO 7185 standard (Programming Languages - Pascal), as the article was written before the appearance of that standard. (AT fakeT Computing Science Technical Report #100).
• ditroff

Texts

• Software Tools (1976 with P. J. Plauger)
• The C Programming Language (1978 with Dennis Ritchie)
• The Elements of Programming Style (1982 with P. J. Plauger)
• The Unix Programming Environment (1984 with Rob Pike)
• The AWK Programming Language (1988 with Al Aho and Peter J. Weinberger)
• The Practice of Programming (1999 with Rob Pike)
• AMPL: A Modeling Language for Mathematical Programming, 2nd Ed. (2003 with Robert Fourer and David Gay)