I really enjoyed this conversation with Brian. Here's the outline: 0:00 - Introduction 4:24 - 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
Lex, honestly...you have emerged from your seemingly weird, obscure, uncomfortable self (which I always felt I could relate to) and blossomed into this loose, entertaining, funny, outgoing self! (New you or Highly edited?) And...The commercials are hilarious...very personable and you represent the product well. I suddenly want Raycon ear buds and a new bed...keep expanding your horizons, working out beyond belief, exceeding expectations and being a great inspiration (especially for me). Much luv
65 degrees is scorching hot, not sure you want your bed at that temperature given that the body is usually around 37 degrees. You are not seriously using 'fahrenheit' a unit of measurement that is only used in three countries in the entire world for a video uploaded to a global platform?
The C programming language. I was taught C in 1981, I live in the UK, I moved to NY in 1981 to a place called Summit NJ, little did I know it was only 4 miles from the temple of AT&T Bell labs. I have been using c/C++ ever since. It gave me my career. Thank you K&R.
@@Art-is-craftAt Uni I did BASIC, Cobol, PL/1, Algol, Lisp, APL, IBM assembler, PDP 8 assembler, 6808, 6809 assembler. WHen I started work I moved to C and nver looked back. Its paid for my life really. Thanks to Peter Madams for teaching me C.
@@StEvUgnIn Well, hindsight is always geat 🙂, I spent about 1.4 years in NY and then came home to the UK, my work mate friend stayed over there and started working for a agency called AGS (I think), and was then contracted into Bell Labs, how lucky was he.
I'm about to graduate and my teachers at university almost never responded to my e-mails until this day. When I was a sophomore I e-mailed a wall of text to Brian Kernighan. He responded in a day or two. He is such a nice person. Hope I'll have a chance to meet with him in person.
This is always the case. The really good people (world class) do not know arrogance. They answer every question. I have experienced this so often in my life.
Wow! What a treat! Mr. Kernighan himself! This was truly one of the best interviews on the history of computing. He has such a rigorous way of thinking! I’m among those who still use AWK and grep😜 good stuff is simply too good to let it go. Btw. it’s impressive how knowledgeable Lex is, this conversation was so smooth. Thank you!
Let's appreciate the sponsors who brought this to us. I watched Mr. Kernighan's teachings for along time. I even remember his papers being quoted in almost every programming book I read. Remember when a tip was change in your pocket?
If life is a simulation I demand from our simulators to make thousands and thousands of copies of Brian Kernighan, and scatter them all over the world's universities at least 10 K.B/per university. Man what a breath of fresh air this man is. The right amount of smart, humor and as Lex put it best "infinitely humble" And Lexi boy this podcast is surely and steadily turning into a beacon of knowledge guiding curious souls to the shores of wisdom. ~Keep it up man keep it up!~
It's the mark of a man whose done his best work and worked along side other better and more talented people. In particular, he seems to circle back to Ken Thompson a lot. Ken sounds like he was a genius who was way ahead of his time. I bet he spent a lot of time being frustrated by having to interact with morons who would never be able to comprehend the ideas in his head. Most of us can't comprehend his ideas after they left his head.
@@darylallen2485 , lol, Thompson is just a geek who likes to play computer games. He is a very talented programmer indeed, with great structured code, but he is not a genius. Most of the ideas he used in Unix came from other people's research.
@@solderbuff I get what you're saying. Sure, there were probably smarter and more knowledgeable people in the field of computing and academia. The Wright brothers were high school drop outs. They invented flight while academia theorized and hypothesize the notion. I'm sure many contemporaries of the Wright brothers were smarter and produced some contributing research. At the end of the day, two highschool drop outs were first to build a flying craft. In my mind, Ken Thompson is a genius like that. Maybe there were some people of his day who were better at theorizing and researching. Ken got his hands dirty and made things to impact the real world. I think it's a kind of genius that gets downplayed by academics. I consider him a genius and an inspiration.
@@darylallen2485 , yeah, I agree here. Thompson is closer to Wright brothers. While others were building great castles out of sand (Multics), Thompson built a steady brick barn that is Unix. Thompson and the others at Bell Labs struggled to keep it as simple as possible. And even though many at the time thought that Unix is inferior to other operating systems, the simplicity of Unix (and C) is exactly what allowed it to become so widely adapted. There is this ingenuity of simplicity.
Really enjoyable interview with one of my Computer Science heroes. I have "The C Programming Language" prominently displayed on my bookshelf and will always stay there. It was my bible in college.
Lex as a UNIX admin and a massive fan of your channel I find myself taken over with euphoria in the discovery of this discussion!!! Thanks so much man ..
I learned C right after programming in DG assembly language and still have the first print edition of The C Language on my book shelf. Personally I can't express my enjoyment of listening to this interview. I still use C/C++ today as my favorite language after many tangents to other languages throughout my 47 year career as a systems engineer.
I did the opposite: learned C first (back in high school or college, to program my graphing calculator), then assembly (z/Architecture). The insight about how memory is allocated and mapped you get from C was invaluable to understand how things can be implemented at the machine level. I'm still amazed at how that language strikes what's probably as close as you can get to the optimal balance between abstraction (practical expressivity, clarity, portability) and close mapping to a stored-program computer architecture (theoretical expressivity, efficiency). In addition to that, plain C (without awkward extension) is a very elegant language, IMHO (nothing to add, nothing to remove as attributed to Saint-Exupery, plus rien à ajouter, [...] plus rien à retrancher). As I've already sidetracked, I might as well add that I even took the habit to comment operations and control structures in my assembly programs using C, like that (real code snippet, comments have been translated to English): * nbEntrees => R7 : Numbre of entries read. * ptrTable => R9 : Pointer to entries' table. NB 2022: I should have added that sizeof(struct entry) is 20 bytes in that comment for later. * do { LOOP1 EQU * * Read record in buffer (R1 -> buffer) NB 2022: GET is probably a built-in assembly macro from what I remember... GET FICHIN * Copy 20 bytes from read buffer to ptrTable MVC 0(20,R9),0(R1) * ptrTable++; //NB 2022: Yeah, LA is for LOAD ADDRESS but was wildly used for simple integer arithmetic and perfect for pointer stuff like that. LA R9,20(0,R9) * nbEntrees++; LA R7,1(0,R7) * } while(true) /* ON_EOF handle branch to ENDB1 when * last record is reached. */ B LOOP1
Way back in the day I wrote a whole class on AWK programming... what a great tool. It's a real treat to get to hear from Brian Kernighan - his name is one that I've known for 35 years but I don't think I ever even knew what he looked like. Thanks Lex!
Brian Kernighan is always such a gracious and fun guest to listen to. He really conveys his love for the science/art of programming, and his archival knowledge of the earlier era he helped to shape is really invaluable. Beyond that, there are two points I'd like to comment on: (1) It may be because I'm older, but it always amuses me when younger generations aren't aware of the technologies and utilities that the current technologies are built on or have superseded, especially when they work in those affected fields. Now here, Lex may be taking some narrative license for the benefit of his audience, in that he asks questions that may seem like he should know the answer to or be familiar with (as he always does his research), but because of his youth, he may not actually be aware of some of the history. But then, I grew up with rotary dial telephones, black and white televisions, no video games (until Pong), etc. No slight to Lex, it's just a little humorous to me I guess, in that historical technology is somewhat forgotten or ash-canned, unlike social or political history. Also, it makes me feel a little closer connection to Brian or anyone of that era because I lived through the days of punch cards, 4 and 8 bit processors, 16K memory, TRS-80s, and no "mice"! (2) I'm surprised Brian didn't mention the Perl programming language or if he ever used it much since it came out. I watched him on a Computerphile video where he said Larry Wall developed it in response to the lag in waiting for the second(?) version of AWK to be released to the public. But he added that Perl had become so much more. Just wondered if he just never really had a use for it, or if he'd moved on from it, or if there was some mild animosity to it? I love it myself, but I seem to be in a shrinking minority. Okay, one further point (and slightly off-topic comment): Number one on my tech wish list is for the advancement in battery technology. Put everything else on hold til this is done. Tired of having to charge stuff up all the time - usually concurrently. Phone, watch, portable wifi, and laptop always gulping up the juice. Some of it is software's fault for being too bloated and resource hungry. Second wish list item is lets have some equilibrium where hardware advances can let us coast for awhile before software "advances" bog it right back down again (remember bloat?). Third wish list item is somebody please develop the 30 year operating system so we don't keep upgrading ad infinitum. K, cheers! Good vid.
Mr. Kernighan seems like a genuine person. This content is invaluable. Hearing him speak enthusiastically about technology after all these years is really refreshing. Great guest Lex!
MS-DOS was no worse than the machine it was running on. When the IBM PC was introduced, memory was USD $3500 per megabyte (inflation adjusted to 2020) from the cheapest source recorded (this was not server-grade memory). Nobody had even heard of gigabytes. ¶ This is why the IBM PC wouldn't even accept 1 MB of primary RAM. The price of consumer DRAM began to plummet after the introduction of the IBM PC and it was only about 1/3 as much a year later, especially of memory expansion boards that went beyond the amount of memory you could address normally. For extended or expanded memory, you had to set commands to IO ports to switch different banks of expansion memory into addressable space; this was slow and broke your pointers. Later on, people would buy 3 MB of memory and devote the whole thing to disk caching (the hard drives were also brutally slow) and not even try to use this memory for applications. ¶ You couldn't reasonably time share (or multitask) at this price of memory unless a professional group of people bought a minicomputer collectively. Everyone who criticized the PC was used to a professional system from work or academia. ¶ I'm presently sitting in front of a FreeBSD machine with 16 GB that punted my entire desktop yesterday because it ran out of swap space. The only two programs I was running of any significance were Firefox and Thunderbird. I use FreeBSD because I like ZFS. I've never even tried to run ZFS in a system with less than 8 GB. A decent computing facility with 8 GB of memory back in 1984 would have cost USD $85 million for the memory alone (after you triple the price from consumer memory to server memory). ZFS uses 8 GB on my desktop system basically as a glorified disk cache (more for integrity reasons than anything). ¶ The more things change, the more they stay the same. ¶ Check out the memory price history at jcmit.net (note that they are not inflation adjusted). ¶ In any case, my memory woes should be short lived. I'm awaiting 64 GB of ECC memory I purchased used from Houston for USD $2/GB. Then I can swap the 16 GB of memory I presently have in my NAS box into my desktop system (they are both IBM Thinkstations). It will be just like the first time I upgraded from 256 KiB to 640 KiB on the IBM PC. Like xmas morning all over again. I can hardly wait. ¶ [*] But wait I shall have to do, because the memory went from Houston via USPS to the Pitney Bowes collection center in Erlanger, Kentucky where it sat for a week. I'm pretty sure it's now sitting on some railway siding, after taking a CP freight train from Chicago to Minneapolis to Fargo to Moose Jaw. Canadian Pacific still owns a big chunk of the rail system down there, called the Soo line. And then another long leg from Moose Jaw to Vancouver. Rail is about 1/3 of the price per ton-mile over long-haul trucking. And then a fairy to the island. 3500 miles. What did they charge me to shepherd my 0.78 lb package the effective distance from Lisbon, Portugal to Tbilisi, Georgia? USD $15. ¶ Back in the 1200s, Marco Polo travelled 5600 miles in this general direction, but it took him 3.5 years-about the same length of time it took the IBM PC to compile a large C program if you didn't install a disk cache.
It was a knock-off of CPM which was aimed at running on the very earliest microprocessor hardware that was even more constrained than the DEC PDP minicomputer that UNIX was birthed on
Thank you for this! I enjoyed working with Brian, Ken and Dennis ever so briefly when I worked in Mike Wish's department under Peter Weinberger back in the 90's. I think I still have my copy of AWK. Hope you are well Brian.
Reviewing this interview again, as I am going back through the GAWK manual. If we want to, we need not worry about programming languages, and just focus on problems and the usage of the tools, thanks to people as Sr Kernighan.
The history of C is absolutely amazing. They wrote the book in 1977 in the USA, and in 1983 or 84 I came across the language as a random schoolkid with a ZX-Spectrum in the Netherlands. In the days before the internet that is astounding success.
Teacher…, What does it mean to be Afraid, and Live in FEAR.?.?.? You are contemplating why People like Trump, and The Pope, and all the other [world leaders] #QANON /_\ CONTINUE the Lies of Fake Space, the Space Race that never happened “except” these 5G Vaccine EUGENICS that was done to our TEMPORARY Carnal {Corporeal Body} +=+ Temple Avatars where once we were all one people, and there was none of the Fighting, and Attacking, and saying: I AM BETTER then you cause my Iris is still BLUE while yours have been ruined brown??? WE first must “move beyond” [{**}] the ORDER of these OLD WINE SKINS, and talk to our selves as NEW WINE SKINS being our Inner Voices and our “Inner thoughts” that come from The Symbiots [{*}] of The Construct we are all Born into at CONCEPTION……..., not the day our Flesh, and Blood, and Bones comes out of the Wombman… We must “know” we are in A Bio - Binary System where ZERO ONE become the foundation blocks of THE GREAT WORK…….., and we must see that many do not want to OWN what they have done……., so they can be REDEEMED “when they die” / * \ too this Celestial Sphere Home World known as PURGATORY cause [they think} they got an out…..., or a Scrape Goat….., or a LOOP HOLE for These {10 Commandments] that make so much more sense in our FLAT EARTH Reality where Mother is the DOME OF THE ROCK…., and OUR Father is these hallowed ground we come from…, and return to.., and once you can see this “Book of Books” the Biblical known as The Holy Bible., then the Commandment RESPECT your Mother and Father that {your days} /-\ may go well in this life means: Take care of the Sky, and the Seas, and the Lands... Do not fill them with Destruction, and Damnation where WAR IS MURDER is all you will every know!!! Does the Fox say: Come hunt me, and kill me, or the Lion, the Tiger, the Giraffe to the “Polar Bear” say: COME HUNT ME HUMAN, so you can put my skins on “your floors” and my Moose and Dear Heads on the WALLS of Insanity that you walk??? I do not think any of you would want to be Hunted by the U.S. UNITED NATION World Police, and then have them Skin you, and Cut [your head] off like in that Scream and Shout Britney and Mr. Smith Video!!! Then why must you people HUNT Animals for SPORT.?.?.? It is not wrong to “feed” your people and yourself……., but when you Hunt an animal, you are also hunting the SOLIDS in them, the Symbiots in them, and the SPIRITS in them as all life matters……, and all life is SPIRIT… Now, you might “appreciate” why Fur Coats made of the Bashed in heads of Baby Seals is something only EVIL SPIRITS aka Anti-Christ People would do….., for they seek Fame, and Fortune, and Glory, so they want to do WAR IS MURDER when War is against the RULE OF LAW…., but just give (a little mind) some ink on paper, and they will write books that WE THE PEOPLE have the right to Hunt you “into extinction” cause The U.N. Says: This FLAG is allowed to Hunt, and Rape, and Murder all of [these people] under that flag, and you would do well not to FEAR such people, but {pity them} in their sickness of mind, soul, and actions… Remember these PEOPLE whom hunt for SPORT and not food are The Racka, and of Pak-Toe will have nothing to do with The Cursed, The Forsaken, and The Dammed for their JUDGMENT “is evident” in THE WAYS they have lived their lives, and how they Worship S.A.T.A.N. aka WAR IS MURDER….. You see we want to go HOME when we die, not repeat the Curse of Things like them “Bones Buckets” that hang from Dead Trees…. The Book of EXODICE!!!
This is a historic conversation with a CS legend. In any other field, we would kill for a conversation with someone of Brian’s stature: a podcast with Lord Kelvin, for example, or Dirac, or T.S. Eliot. Not a major “celebrity” academic, like Einstein or Newton, but a minor yet endlessly influential one. I am so glad Lex has the interest and platform to have Brian on.
@@amycrunch3812 Interesting opinion Amy... He seems a little reticent socially to me, but you can see for yourself in a lovely Vintage Computer Society interview from May 2019 titled "VCF East 2019 -- Brian Kernighan interviews Ken Thompson" where he regaled all with tales of the early days th-cam.com/video/EY6q5dv_B-o/w-d-xo.html
One of the most humble guests, I enjoyed every moment. What a personality I loved Brian so much. I even felt that you Lex were so much comfortable having this conversation with such a humble human being. Love
Listening to the real people who literally made today's world of computing possible is so insightful. And thanks to Lex I can come back and listen to these conversations anytime I want. Lex Fridman is awesome!
Great podcast. Always consider him as the Master. I started with C. One of the first and the best book I read in programming is The C Programming Language by Kernighan & Ritchie...Thanks a lot Lex Fridman..
Lex, thank you! What a great interview with such a wonderful gentleman. Really took me back to the days of magic when the emergence of microprocessors was changing not only how we engineered products, but society as a whole. Loved the discussion on assembly language. In 1978, the year "The C Programming Language" was published, a friend and I launched a startup. We were using an Intel 8048 for an embedded design. With 64 ram and 1k rom assembly was the only option. I loved the challenge and the "one to one" correspondence to the machine. It was tedious, and occasionally frightening when late at night we feared maybe what we we're trying to do was "impossible". When Brian answered, "when you built something and it worked" I can relate. Anyway, in the '80's when C for micro-controllers was finally an option my first C text was Brian's book. Thank you for introducing me to the man. He does not disappoint.
This is a nice conversation, never thought that I could learn about how UNIX and C were made from a podcast. I love Lex's podcasts especially because of the varios topics that are discussed as well as the many brilliant guest he has on. Much Love Lex.
05:25 ctss, 64, IBM 09:20 multics 26:40 Xerox parks, MIT 44:00 ken thompson, command-type, qed, before mice or cursor 44:22 unix came along, ed, command-line, printing on paper, vi 47:00 history of programming langages 49:21 fortran, formula translation 49:35 cobol, business oriented 49:44 algol, algorithm, computation 50:17 language not tied to a particular type of hardware, write once, democratize 51:02 system programming, C 52:06 object oriented programming langages, c++ 53:00 C 55:24 marvelous example of how to write a reference manual 59:35 go, european influence, C for the 21st century, concurrency 01:01:40 parall thread 01:04:00 rust 01:21:30 theorical computer science, research, was not cut out for these stuff, writing programs, ultimately writing books 01:22:19 AI landscape
It would be nice to have the date of the actual recording in the description for all the interviews or better yet in the introduction. Your videos have excellent historical value.
For those who have never worked with them, the original TTYs were very different from any other type of user interface. It consisted of a type writer where the printing and the keyboard are disconnected. You talk to the computer using the keyboard, and the computer talks back by printing stuff. This was usually chained paper, i.e. the result would not be loose sheets but a long scroll that could be folded. One of the main differences is that this automatically logs your interactions with the computer. Everything is stored right there on the paper. This means that e.g. text editors did not have to provide the whole context of a file, allow scrolling etc. Because you can print the file once and physically scroll back to it on the paper scroll produced by the printer.
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To this day, 10 years after really learning it well, awk is my superpower as a sysadmin. Most people only learn it for one-liners, but the crazy amount of power you get from learning to write 20-100 line awk programs is just insane. It’s a gem hidden in plain sight. Nothing compares, except maybe jq for JSON parsing, but awk is just so much more comfortable and natural in comparison.
I love that you are a constant romantic Lex! It really catches some of your guests off guard in a good way imo. Too often this facet of humanity is lost in Scientific discourse- which is appropriate in professional environments for sure. Podcasts are great in that they fill the gap between the need for professionalism about the field and open conversation about its fundamental underpinnings, both human and not. This lets all those involved let loose and express their knowledge in a different way. Thanks again for another great podcast. I'll tune in next time I'm sure.
If you enjoyed this episode, please do yourself a favor and read Brian's newest book. It's a fantastic first hand source of the history of Bell Labs and Unix.
TIOBE Index for January 2021, C programming language, 1st place after almost 50 years, Brian still is alive to see it, Dennis would be so proud of his creation. When something is brilliant it never becomes old fashioned.
Thanks for having Brian on your channel. I have purchased the K&R book on C a dozen times since my intro in 1981. I either lost or gave a copy away over the decades!
They're talking about the days I started in. I was in high school when I first came face to face with my first Time Sharing system... the GE-265. I worked with a group of guys who would go out and acquire systems that had become obsolete from the mid-60s and we'd bring them into an air conditioned warehouse and get them running again, and sell time on the time sharing systems. This was an all black business in a black neighborhood mind you. We'd teach classes in computer programming to young students who were interested in such things back then. It went on for a couple of years, but the problem was we were on the cusp of the end of the minicomputer/mainframe age and the beginning of the "Microcomputer" age, these days known as the personal computer. The Apple II killed us. I went on to become heavily involved in the DEC PDP world, using operating systems like UNIX, RSTS, and RSX-11. Then VAX/VMS. Then Apple did it to me again. A friend showed me what I had once called a stupid little Etch-A-Sketch computer called the Macintosh. My life was interrupted. Since then not a day has gone by where I haven't had a Mac in front of me. I'm 65 years old now and even though technically "retired" I still earn a living through freelance coding and remote system/network administration. People ask how I know so much about computers being so old and I explain that it is difficult for me to remember a day that I wasn't in front of some kind of keyboard since 1975. I have two MacBook Pro M1/Max machines in front of me right now, and I'm building a new a new Apache James mail server for a client. Never tell kids you've forgotten more about computers than they currently know. They don't quite get it. They think you mean you've got Biden Brain.
I've watched videos with Brian Kernighan on Computerfile before, and he's a great communicator and you can tell he has passion for his field. It's always fun to listen to interviews with him. I didn't know much of AWK and AMPL though, i guess they get eclipsed by UNIX and C in most shorter form interviews. I really like the conceptual simplicity and ease of use of AWK for doing a potentially common task much less verbose and more ergonomic.
Loved the chat . The C book with illustrative examples and crisp reference is an all time classic. Ed line editor , nroff - gems indeed. Have not used these for many years. But still use perl and make .
"Are you kidding? We did it in Troff" "I don't even know what that is" "Yeah, precisely" That made me laugh, if for no other reason than I'm demonstrably a child of the late 1970's at Berkeley, given that I had to mark up my dissertation in troff.
Thank you for having Brian on your podcast Lex . Can you please see what you can do to get some more of the greats of computer science? I would like to see Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Ken Thompson and Eric S. Raymond. Keep up the good work, and I too think you should rename the podcast to "The Lex Podcast".
At around 18:55 when Brian Kernighan talked about how hard it is to write in assembly I remembered my first computer job back in 1978 was to figure out why 'something' was not working the way it should. Well, after a few days of search, I pinpoint where the problem is. It turned out that the original programmer commented this "I don't know why the next 10 lines works". After the 10th line he/she wrote "I don't know why the above 10 lines worked". Boy! Did I have a blast. Yes. Assembly coding is challenging.
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While Brian was describing awk, I pulled up the man page for awk and was surprised to see how similar the words he uses to describe them are to the man page.
Lex, if you code assembly language all the time you get into a groove. I coded assembly for commercial games into the 90s. It's difficult but not as hard as you think.
If you code C all the time you get into a groove. I then had to go back to python (which I already knew) because school was teaching python ... its very difficult and non-intuitive, at least for the first few days
@@RhettAnderson To be very honest, thats not my gripe, but using whitespace and indentation as syntax rather than just good practise for readability is where my contentions lie. Its atrocious.
I really enjoyed this conversation with Brian. Here's the outline:
0:00 - Introduction
4:24 - 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
Lex, honestly...you have emerged from your seemingly weird, obscure, uncomfortable self (which I always felt I could relate to) and blossomed into this loose, entertaining, funny, outgoing self! (New you or Highly edited?)
And...The commercials are hilarious...very personable and you represent the product well. I suddenly want Raycon ear buds and a new bed...keep expanding your horizons, working out beyond belief, exceeding expectations and being a great inspiration (especially for me).
Much luv
I think you would love an interview with Alan Kay if you ever get the chance.
David Deutsch!
the commercial was actually quite hilarious
65 degrees is scorching hot, not sure you want your bed at that temperature given that the body is usually around 37 degrees. You are not seriously using 'fahrenheit' a unit of measurement that is only used in three countries in the entire world for a video uploaded to a global platform?
This has to be the best Computer Science/AI related podcast ever, Thanks Lex for everything you do you're inspiring many people.
Lex is a wonderful person! I really hope he gets any support he needs to keep these fascinating interviews going.
STEM
I think Linus Torvalds would be a great guest here
Definitely, I believe Lex would love to have Linus Torvalds as his guest.
Nope
@@caballerosalas how come?
Would rather see Richard Stallman
Should not be invited in my opinion because of his uncivilized behavior.
The C programming language. I was taught C in 1981, I live in the UK, I moved to NY in 1981 to a place called Summit NJ, little did I know it was only 4 miles from the temple of AT&T Bell labs. I have been using c/C++ ever since. It gave me my career. Thank you K&R.
C and C++ are brilliant systems and software engineering languages. Have you experimented with other languages such as the lisp family.
@@Art-is-craftAt Uni I did BASIC, Cobol, PL/1, Algol, Lisp, APL, IBM assembler, PDP 8 assembler, 6808, 6809 assembler. WHen I started work I moved to C and nver looked back. Its paid for my life really. Thanks to Peter Madams for teaching me C.
That's a fantastic story you brought up sir. Do you wish you had applied for a research position at Bell Labs?
@@StEvUgnIn Well, hindsight is always geat 🙂, I spent about 1.4 years in NY and then came home to the UK, my work mate friend stayed over there and started working for a agency called AGS (I think), and was then contracted into Bell Labs, how lucky was he.
@ It’s a huge advantage to be American for this kind of jobs
I'm about to graduate and my teachers at university almost never responded to my e-mails until this day. When I was a sophomore I e-mailed a wall of text to Brian Kernighan. He responded in a day or two. He is such a nice person. Hope I'll have a chance to meet with him in person.
@Jazz Feline I doubt that's written by a human. It's a badly written bot (or one of the worst cases of schizophrenia I've seen in a while.)
@@joey199412 It's a human. There are videos on his channel with similar content.
He's the same. 👍
This is always the case. The really good people (world class) do not know arrogance. They answer every question. I have experienced this so often in my life.
Yeah. Had an awkward implementation question emailed to his bell labs acct and replied the next day. Old school. Cares about the user of his tools.
Honestly, Brian looks really kind, nice and lovely person just really inspiring to see how honest and humble he is.
This guy is a gem and it must have been a pleasure speaking with him.
Your podcasts can be listened even after 100-200 years later. Thanks for your efforts.
By robots, obviously.
that's the point
Wow! What a treat! Mr. Kernighan himself! This was truly one of the best interviews on the history of computing. He has such a rigorous way of thinking! I’m among those who still use AWK and grep😜 good stuff is simply too good to let it go. Btw. it’s impressive how knowledgeable Lex is, this conversation was so smooth. Thank you!
In stuff that's current. Not knowing what 'FORTRAN' stands for...
I used AWK a couple weeks ago
Unix command line tools and c language.. evergreen
AWK: small and beautiful
Thanks, this has been amazing. Now it's time for Ken Thompson.
2:23 Damn wasn't expecting this level of smoothness on a podcast about computer science
Hahaha I was thinking the same thing
He was always the total package, just short a temperature app-controlled mattress.
Did we just witness the birth of a new pick-up line? 😁
Let's appreciate the sponsors who brought this to us. I watched Mr. Kernighan's teachings for along time. I even remember his papers being quoted in almost every programming book I read. Remember when a tip was change in your pocket?
If life is a simulation I demand from our simulators to make thousands and thousands of copies of Brian Kernighan, and scatter them all over the world's universities at least 10 K.B/per university.
Man what a breath of fresh air this man is. The right amount of smart, humor and as Lex put it best "infinitely humble"
And Lexi boy this podcast is surely and steadily turning into a beacon of knowledge guiding curious souls to the shores of wisdom.
~Keep it up man keep it up!~
Kernighan massively downplays his role in projects he's worked on, every single time. That's interesting.
It's the mark of a man whose done his best work and worked along side other better and more talented people. In particular, he seems to circle back to Ken Thompson a lot. Ken sounds like he was a genius who was way ahead of his time. I bet he spent a lot of time being frustrated by having to interact with morons who would never be able to comprehend the ideas in his head. Most of us can't comprehend his ideas after they left his head.
@@darylallen2485 Thompson is still alive btw
@@darylallen2485 , lol, Thompson is just a geek who likes to play computer games. He is a very talented programmer indeed, with great structured code, but he is not a genius. Most of the ideas he used in Unix came from other people's research.
@@solderbuff I get what you're saying. Sure, there were probably smarter and more knowledgeable people in the field of computing and academia.
The Wright brothers were high school drop outs. They invented flight while academia theorized and hypothesize the notion. I'm sure many contemporaries of the Wright brothers were smarter and produced some contributing research. At the end of the day, two highschool drop outs were first to build a flying craft.
In my mind, Ken Thompson is a genius like that. Maybe there were some people of his day who were better at theorizing and researching. Ken got his hands dirty and made things to impact the real world. I think it's a kind of genius that gets downplayed by academics. I consider him a genius and an inspiration.
@@darylallen2485 , yeah, I agree here. Thompson is closer to Wright brothers. While others were building great castles out of sand (Multics), Thompson built a steady brick barn that is Unix. Thompson and the others at Bell Labs struggled to keep it as simple as possible. And even though many at the time thought that Unix is inferior to other operating systems, the simplicity of Unix (and C) is exactly what allowed it to become so widely adapted. There is this ingenuity of simplicity.
You can tell someone is a master of their art when they can make the complicated simple to understand.
Really enjoyable interview with one of my Computer Science heroes. I have "The C Programming Language" prominently displayed on my bookshelf and will always stay there. It was my bible in college.
Same. I have a signed copy...a treasured possession. My daughter just studied C at Purdue and I pulled out the book and showed her the signature. 🤯
@@mtiller I’m at Purdue right now for cybersecurity! Small world 😅
Such a humble man. Thank you, sir, for your contributions to the world of programming.
Lex as a UNIX admin and a massive fan of your channel I find myself taken over with euphoria in the discovery of this discussion!!! Thanks so much man ..
One of the best computer science/engineering interviews available today. Thank you both for an enlightening and edifying conversation.
I learned C right after programming in DG assembly language and still have the first print edition of The C Language on my book shelf. Personally I can't express my enjoyment of listening to this interview. I still use C/C++ today as my favorite language after many tangents to other languages throughout my 47 year career as a systems engineer.
I did the opposite: learned C first (back in high school or college, to program my graphing calculator), then assembly (z/Architecture). The insight about how memory is allocated and mapped you get from C was invaluable to understand how things can be implemented at the machine level. I'm still amazed at how that language strikes what's probably as close as you can get to the optimal balance between abstraction (practical expressivity, clarity, portability) and close mapping to a stored-program computer architecture (theoretical expressivity, efficiency). In addition to that, plain C (without awkward extension) is a very elegant language, IMHO (nothing to add, nothing to remove as attributed to Saint-Exupery, plus rien à ajouter, [...] plus rien à retrancher).
As I've already sidetracked, I might as well add that I even took the habit to comment operations and control structures in my assembly programs using C, like that (real code snippet, comments have been translated to English):
* nbEntrees => R7 : Numbre of entries read.
* ptrTable => R9 : Pointer to entries' table. NB 2022: I should have added that sizeof(struct entry) is 20 bytes in that comment for later.
* do {
LOOP1 EQU *
* Read record in buffer (R1 -> buffer) NB 2022: GET is probably a built-in assembly macro from what I remember...
GET FICHIN
* Copy 20 bytes from read buffer to ptrTable
MVC 0(20,R9),0(R1)
* ptrTable++; //NB 2022: Yeah, LA is for LOAD ADDRESS but was wildly used for simple integer arithmetic and perfect for pointer stuff like that.
LA R9,20(0,R9)
* nbEntrees++;
LA R7,1(0,R7)
* } while(true) /* ON_EOF handle branch to ENDB1 when
* last record is reached. */
B LOOP1
@@fredericbrown8871thank you
Way back in the day I wrote a whole class on AWK programming... what a great tool. It's a real treat to get to hear from Brian Kernighan - his name is one that I've known for 35 years but I don't think I ever even knew what he looked like. Thanks Lex!
Every interview I've seen with Brian as been an absolute joy. We are lucky to have him in our community.
Brian Kernighan is always such a gracious and fun guest to listen to. He really conveys his love for the science/art of programming, and his archival knowledge of the earlier era he helped to shape is really invaluable.
Beyond that, there are two points I'd like to comment on:
(1) It may be because I'm older, but it always amuses me when younger generations aren't aware of the technologies and utilities that the current technologies are built on or have superseded, especially when they work in those affected fields. Now here, Lex may be taking some narrative license for the benefit of his audience, in that he asks questions that may seem like he should know the answer to or be familiar with (as he always does his research), but because of his youth, he may not actually be aware of some of the history. But then, I grew up with rotary dial telephones, black and white televisions, no video games (until Pong), etc. No slight to Lex, it's just a little humorous to me I guess, in that historical technology is somewhat forgotten or ash-canned, unlike social or political history. Also, it makes me feel a little closer connection to Brian or anyone of that era because I lived through the days of punch cards, 4 and 8 bit processors, 16K memory, TRS-80s, and no "mice"!
(2) I'm surprised Brian didn't mention the Perl programming language or if he ever used it much since it came out. I watched him on a Computerphile video where he said Larry Wall developed it in response to the lag in waiting for the second(?) version of AWK to be released to the public. But he added that Perl had become so much more. Just wondered if he just never really had a use for it, or if he'd moved on from it, or if there was some mild animosity to it? I love it myself, but I seem to be in a shrinking minority.
Okay, one further point (and slightly off-topic comment):
Number one on my tech wish list is for the advancement in battery technology. Put everything else on hold til this is done. Tired of having to charge stuff up all the time - usually concurrently. Phone, watch, portable wifi, and laptop always gulping up the juice. Some of it is software's fault for being too bloated and resource hungry. Second wish list item is lets have some equilibrium where hardware advances can let us coast for awhile before software "advances" bog it right back down again (remember bloat?). Third wish list item is somebody please develop the 30 year operating system so we don't keep upgrading ad infinitum.
K, cheers! Good vid.
Mr. Kernighan seems like a genuine person. This content is invaluable. Hearing him speak enthusiastically about technology after all these years is really refreshing. Great guest Lex!
I love this man and Dennis Ritchie since 30 years ago! they are the reason the world progressed this fast!
what a gift of an interview. K&R was my favorite book in college. Still can’t part with it 25 years later.
"MS-DOS was a pretty pathetic operating system". Precise words....
40:21
MS-DOS was no worse than the machine it was running on. When the IBM PC was introduced, memory was USD $3500 per megabyte (inflation adjusted to 2020) from the cheapest source recorded (this was not server-grade memory). Nobody had even heard of gigabytes.
¶
This is why the IBM PC wouldn't even accept 1 MB of primary RAM. The price of consumer DRAM began to plummet after the introduction of the IBM PC and it was only about 1/3 as much a year later, especially of memory expansion boards that went beyond the amount of memory you could address normally. For extended or expanded memory, you had to set commands to IO ports to switch different banks of expansion memory into addressable space; this was slow and broke your pointers. Later on, people would buy 3 MB of memory and devote the whole thing to disk caching (the hard drives were also brutally slow) and not even try to use this memory for applications.
¶
You couldn't reasonably time share (or multitask) at this price of memory unless a professional group of people bought a minicomputer collectively. Everyone who criticized the PC was used to a professional system from work or academia.
¶
I'm presently sitting in front of a FreeBSD machine with 16 GB that punted my entire desktop yesterday because it ran out of swap space. The only two programs I was running of any significance were Firefox and Thunderbird. I use FreeBSD because I like ZFS. I've never even tried to run ZFS in a system with less than 8 GB. A decent computing facility with 8 GB of memory back in 1984 would have cost USD $85 million for the memory alone (after you triple the price from consumer memory to server memory). ZFS uses 8 GB on my desktop system basically as a glorified disk cache (more for integrity reasons than anything).
¶
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
¶
Check out the memory price history at jcmit.net (note that they are not inflation adjusted).
¶
In any case, my memory woes should be short lived. I'm awaiting 64 GB of ECC memory I purchased used from Houston for USD $2/GB. Then I can swap the 16 GB of memory I presently have in my NAS box into my desktop system (they are both IBM Thinkstations). It will be just like the first time I upgraded from 256 KiB to 640 KiB on the IBM PC. Like xmas morning all over again. I can hardly wait.
¶
[*] But wait I shall have to do, because the memory went from Houston via USPS to the Pitney Bowes collection center in Erlanger, Kentucky where it sat for a week. I'm pretty sure it's now sitting on some railway siding, after taking a CP freight train from Chicago to Minneapolis to Fargo to Moose Jaw. Canadian Pacific still owns a big chunk of the rail system down there, called the Soo line. And then another long leg from Moose Jaw to Vancouver. Rail is about 1/3 of the price per ton-mile over long-haul trucking. And then a fairy to the island. 3500 miles. What did they charge me to shepherd my 0.78 lb package the effective distance from Lisbon, Portugal to Tbilisi, Georgia? USD $15.
¶
Back in the 1200s, Marco Polo travelled 5600 miles in this general direction, but it took him 3.5 years-about the same length of time it took the IBM PC to compile a large C program if you didn't install a disk cache.
@@afterthesmash I can't believe you managed to bring that back to DOS.
It was a knock-off of CPM which was aimed at running on the very earliest microprocessor hardware that was even more constrained than the DEC PDP minicomputer that UNIX was birthed on
Yeah the MS - Dirty Operating System is pretty bad
What a brilliant interview and interviewee. Thank you Lex. Thank you Brian. I loved every second of this.
Listened the entire talk, did not press the forward button not even once. It was good listening to people passionate about their work.
26:25 it requires tremendous amount of maturity and integrity to give an answer like that ..
Thank you for this! I enjoyed working with Brian, Ken and Dennis ever so briefly when I worked in Mike Wish's department under Peter Weinberger back in the 90's. I think I still have my copy of AWK. Hope you are well Brian.
Are you Lorinda from th-cam.com/video/tc4ROCJYbm0/w-d-xo.html ?
Reviewing this interview again, as I am going back through the GAWK manual. If we want to, we need not worry about programming languages, and just focus on problems and the usage of the tools, thanks to people as Sr Kernighan.
Brian is a great engineer! People like him are pure gold for the computer science field! Thanks Brian, great interview Lex!
The history of C is absolutely amazing. They wrote the book in 1977 in the USA, and in 1983 or 84 I came across the language as a random schoolkid with a ZX-Spectrum in the Netherlands. In the days before the internet that is astounding success.
Woah. I see Kernighan in my notifications, I click.
Teacher…, What does it mean to be Afraid, and Live in FEAR.?.?.? You are contemplating why People like Trump, and The Pope, and all the other [world leaders] #QANON /_\ CONTINUE the Lies of Fake Space, the Space Race that never happened “except” these 5G Vaccine EUGENICS that was done to our TEMPORARY Carnal {Corporeal Body} +=+ Temple Avatars where once we were all one people, and there was none of the Fighting, and Attacking, and saying: I AM BETTER then you cause my Iris is still BLUE while yours have been ruined brown??? WE first must “move beyond” [{**}] the ORDER of these OLD WINE SKINS, and talk to our selves as NEW WINE SKINS being our Inner Voices and our “Inner thoughts” that come from The Symbiots [{*}] of The Construct we are all Born into at CONCEPTION……..., not the day our Flesh, and Blood, and Bones comes out of the Wombman… We must “know” we are in A Bio - Binary System where ZERO ONE become the foundation blocks of THE GREAT WORK…….., and we must see that many do not want to OWN what they have done……., so they can be REDEEMED “when they die” / * \ too this Celestial Sphere Home World known as PURGATORY cause [they think} they got an out…..., or a Scrape Goat….., or a LOOP HOLE for These {10 Commandments] that make so much more sense in our FLAT EARTH Reality where Mother is the DOME OF THE ROCK…., and OUR Father is these hallowed ground we come from…, and return to.., and once you can see this “Book of Books” the Biblical known as The Holy Bible., then the Commandment RESPECT your Mother and Father that {your days} /-\ may go well in this life means: Take care of the Sky, and the Seas, and the Lands... Do not fill them with Destruction, and Damnation where WAR IS MURDER is all you will every know!!! Does the Fox say: Come hunt me, and kill me, or the Lion, the Tiger, the Giraffe to the “Polar Bear” say: COME HUNT ME HUMAN, so you can put my skins on “your floors” and my Moose and Dear Heads on the WALLS of Insanity that you walk??? I do not think any of you would want to be Hunted by the U.S. UNITED NATION World Police, and then have them Skin you, and Cut [your head] off like in that Scream and Shout Britney and Mr. Smith Video!!! Then why must you people HUNT Animals for SPORT.?.?.? It is not wrong to “feed” your people and yourself……., but when you Hunt an animal, you are also hunting the SOLIDS in them, the Symbiots in them, and the SPIRITS in them as all life matters……, and all life is SPIRIT… Now, you might “appreciate” why Fur Coats made of the Bashed in heads of Baby Seals is something only EVIL SPIRITS aka Anti-Christ People would do….., for they seek Fame, and Fortune, and Glory, so they want to do WAR IS MURDER when War is against the RULE OF LAW…., but just give (a little mind) some ink on paper, and they will write books that WE THE PEOPLE have the right to Hunt you “into extinction” cause The U.N. Says: This FLAG is allowed to Hunt, and Rape, and Murder all of [these people] under that flag, and you would do well not to FEAR such people, but {pity them} in their sickness of mind, soul, and actions… Remember these PEOPLE whom hunt for SPORT and not food are The Racka, and of Pak-Toe will have nothing to do with The Cursed, The Forsaken, and The Dammed for their JUDGMENT “is evident” in THE WAYS they have lived their lives, and how they Worship S.A.T.A.N. aka WAR IS MURDER….. You see we want to go HOME when we die, not repeat the Curse of Things like them “Bones Buckets” that hang from Dead Trees…. The Book of EXODICE!!!
@Weghweh Hwewehwhe euh... Ken Thompson ?
Here's to that, brother! The name just screams "I gotta watch this!".
Fuck yeah!
He looks like a young man pretending to be an older man.
This is a historic conversation with a CS legend. In any other field, we would kill for a conversation with someone of Brian’s stature: a podcast with Lord Kelvin, for example, or Dirac, or T.S. Eliot.
Not a major “celebrity” academic, like Einstein or Newton, but a minor yet endlessly influential one.
I am so glad Lex has the interest and platform to have Brian on.
What an interesting, wonderful talk. It's great that some of these pioneers in computers are still with us.
A god among those in this space and someone whose inventions I have used for my entire 30 year Unix career so far and still use today .
You continue to bring legends on this podcast. You're like the David Letterman of podcasters.
You should get Ken Thompson on here!
Ken only speaks Klingon these days.
@@amycrunch3812 Interesting opinion Amy... He seems a little reticent socially to me, but you can see for yourself in a lovely Vintage Computer Society interview from May 2019 titled "VCF East 2019 -- Brian Kernighan interviews Ken Thompson" where he regaled all with tales of the early days
th-cam.com/video/EY6q5dv_B-o/w-d-xo.html
One of the most humble guests, I enjoyed every moment. What a personality I loved Brian so much. I even felt that you Lex were so much comfortable having this conversation with such a humble human being. Love
Listening to the real people who literally made today's world of computing possible is so insightful. And thanks to Lex I can come back and listen to these conversations anytime I want. Lex Fridman is awesome!
Great podcast. Always consider him as the Master. I started with C. One of the first and the best book I read in programming is The C Programming Language by Kernighan & Ritchie...Thanks a lot Lex Fridman..
Lex, thank you! What a great interview with such a wonderful gentleman. Really took me back to the days of magic when the emergence of microprocessors was changing not only how we engineered products, but society as a whole. Loved the discussion on assembly language. In 1978, the year "The C Programming Language" was published, a friend and I launched a startup. We were using an Intel 8048 for an embedded design. With 64 ram and 1k rom assembly was the only option. I loved the challenge and the "one to one" correspondence to the machine. It was tedious, and occasionally frightening when late at night we feared maybe what we we're trying to do was "impossible". When Brian answered, "when you built something and it worked" I can relate. Anyway, in the '80's when C for micro-controllers was finally an option my first C text was Brian's book. Thank you for introducing me to the man. He does not disappoint.
How did the startup go?
This is a nice conversation, never thought that I could learn about how UNIX and C were made from a podcast. I love Lex's podcasts especially because of the varios topics that are discussed as well as the many brilliant guest he has on. Much Love Lex.
Mr. Kernighan is such a humble man. Legend
I really love these interviews. You really find great people to interview. Really the best humanity has to offer.
That was an incredible interview! It's so inspiring to see how humble Brian is about the remarkable work he has done.
It is a privilege to listen to men of such relevance in the history of computing. Brian Kernighan is a true pioneer ;)
05:25 ctss, 64, IBM 09:20 multics 26:40 Xerox parks, MIT 44:00 ken thompson, command-type, qed, before mice or cursor 44:22 unix came along, ed, command-line, printing on paper, vi 47:00 history of programming langages 49:21 fortran, formula translation 49:35 cobol, business oriented 49:44 algol, algorithm, computation 50:17 language not tied to a particular type of hardware, write once, democratize 51:02 system programming, C 52:06 object oriented programming langages, c++ 53:00 C 55:24 marvelous example of how to write a reference manual 59:35 go, european influence, C for the 21st century, concurrency 01:01:40 parall thread 01:04:00 rust 01:21:30 theorical computer science, research, was not cut out for these stuff, writing programs, ultimately writing books 01:22:19 AI landscape
What a wonderful and kind man Brian is with a wealth of knowledge. Great interview, I love this episode.
incredible episode. Brian Kernighan is really a living legend.
Brian Kernighan is truly a gift
It would be nice to have the date of the actual recording in the description for all the interviews or better yet in the introduction. Your videos have excellent historical value.
For those who have never worked with them, the original TTYs were very different from any other type of user interface. It consisted of a type writer where the printing and the keyboard are disconnected. You talk to the computer using the keyboard, and the computer talks back by printing stuff. This was usually chained paper, i.e. the result would not be loose sheets but a long scroll that could be folded.
One of the main differences is that this automatically logs your interactions with the computer. Everything is stored right there on the paper. This means that e.g. text editors did not have to provide the whole context of a file, allow scrolling etc. Because you can print the file once and physically scroll back to it on the paper scroll produced by the printer.
Now an interview with Ken Thompson! He is really an inspiring programmer but there are almost no public records of him.
Wow that's nice, thanks for replying, you can send a message to my administrator James on watsap to earn in crypto, Stocks and ETFs.
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he's excellent at what he does, tell him I referred you to him. His passionate strategies are top notch.🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Without Unix my favorite language Ruby would never exist. Thank you!
Please bring Ken Thompson... Would love to see him
One of my personal heroes. I also admirable how humble the man is.
Such a legend, yet so humble. There are so many things we can learn from Brian. The world thanks you, and thank you, Lex, for interviewing him!
58:44 Go language
1:01:57 Learning new programming languages
1:04:57 Javascript
Brian is so humble! Not my first time listening to Lex or Brian but what a great interview!
To this day, 10 years after really learning it well, awk is my superpower as a sysadmin. Most people only learn it for one-liners, but the crazy amount of power you get from learning to write 20-100 line awk programs is just insane. It’s a gem hidden in plain sight. Nothing compares, except maybe jq for JSON parsing, but awk is just so much more comfortable and natural in comparison.
I love that you are a constant romantic Lex! It really catches some of your guests off guard in a good way imo. Too often this facet of humanity is lost in Scientific discourse- which is appropriate in professional environments for sure. Podcasts are great in that they fill the gap between the need for professionalism about the field and open conversation about its fundamental underpinnings, both human and not. This lets all those involved let loose and express their knowledge in a different way. Thanks again for another great podcast. I'll tune in next time I'm sure.
If you enjoyed this episode, please do yourself a favor and read Brian's newest book. It's a fantastic first hand source of the history of Bell Labs and Unix.
Thank you for this recommendation.
"In the beginning was the word and the word was with" ... I love Brian
TIOBE Index for January 2021, C programming language, 1st place after almost 50 years, Brian still is alive to see it, Dennis would be so proud of his creation. When something is brilliant it never becomes old fashioned.
Thanks for having Brian on your channel. I have purchased the K&R book on C a dozen times since my intro in 1981. I either lost or gave a copy away over the decades!
They're talking about the days I started in. I was in high school when I first came face to face with my first Time Sharing system... the GE-265. I worked with a group of guys who would go out and acquire systems that had become obsolete from the mid-60s and we'd bring them into an air conditioned warehouse and get them running again, and sell time on the time sharing systems. This was an all black business in a black neighborhood mind you. We'd teach classes in computer programming to young students who were interested in such things back then. It went on for a couple of years, but the problem was we were on the cusp of the end of the minicomputer/mainframe age and the beginning of the "Microcomputer" age, these days known as the personal computer. The Apple II killed us.
I went on to become heavily involved in the DEC PDP world, using operating systems like UNIX, RSTS, and RSX-11. Then VAX/VMS. Then Apple did it to me again. A friend showed me what I had once called a stupid little Etch-A-Sketch computer called the Macintosh. My life was interrupted. Since then not a day has gone by where I haven't had a Mac in front of me.
I'm 65 years old now and even though technically "retired" I still earn a living through freelance coding and remote system/network administration. People ask how I know so much about computers being so old and I explain that it is difficult for me to remember a day that I wasn't in front of some kind of keyboard since 1975. I have two MacBook Pro M1/Max machines in front of me right now, and I'm building a new a new Apache James mail server for a client.
Never tell kids you've forgotten more about computers than they currently know. They don't quite get it. They think you mean you've got Biden Brain.
Absolute legend, his contributions to computing and programming are on par with Sir Ritchie.
I've watched videos with Brian Kernighan on Computerfile before, and he's a great communicator and you can tell he has passion for his field. It's always fun to listen to interviews with him. I didn't know much of AWK and AMPL though, i guess they get eclipsed by UNIX and C in most shorter form interviews. I really like the conceptual simplicity and ease of use of AWK for doing a potentially common task much less verbose and more ergonomic.
This is easily your best interview.
Loved the chat . The C book with illustrative examples and crisp reference is an all time classic. Ed line editor , nroff - gems indeed. Have not used these for many years. But still use perl and make .
😂 the intro ad for the mattress was one of the funniest things I have ever heard! Never skipping the ads on this channel
"Are you kidding? We did it in Troff"
"I don't even know what that is"
"Yeah, precisely"
That made me laugh, if for no other reason than I'm demonstrably a child of the late 1970's at Berkeley, given that I had to mark up my dissertation in troff.
I have one of my first scientific paper as a graduate student, back in USSR, in troff (or nroff)
This channel and the likes should be called Computer Science Appreciation.
Wow. I had no idea he was still alive let alone this youthful and enthusiastic. What a legend
I've been waiting for this conversation! Thank you, Lex. I think Linus Torvalds would be an interesting guest)
Great conversation. His memory recall is amazing. Lots and lots of details to his descriptions.
Thank you for having Brian on your podcast Lex . Can you please see what you can do to get some more of the greats of computer science? I would like to see Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Ken Thompson and Eric S. Raymond. Keep up the good work, and I too think you should rename the podcast to "The Lex Podcast".
And Rob Pike.
Brian is rocking that Casio watch
At around 18:55 when Brian Kernighan talked about how hard it is to write in assembly I remembered my first computer job back in 1978 was to figure out why 'something' was not working the way it should. Well, after a few days of search, I pinpoint where the problem is. It turned out that the original programmer commented this "I don't know why the next 10 lines works". After the 10th line he/she wrote "I don't know why the above 10 lines worked". Boy! Did I have a blast. Yes. Assembly coding is challenging.
AWK lover here.. marveling at this gem of a discussion
Watching him holding his laugh during the ad made my day.
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he's excellent at what he does, tell him I referred you to him. His passionate strategies are top notch.🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
History of CS is amazing, you should invite more people to talk about this. Mainly old generations of programmers.
one of the best computer science interviews ever - thank for this lex!! 🙏
That WSL is the only thing I love about Windows!
While Brian was describing awk, I pulled up the man page for awk and was surprised to see how similar the words he uses to describe them are to the man page.
Awk is amazing. And i love that any awk question on so gets such great answers 😊
he's so humble for his contributions! - something I learnt from this talk ...
I loved the format of this show... mr. Fridman, thank you. For real.
We need a round 2! please! and Ken Thompson!
Lex, you did a great job interviewing Brian. Thanks for posting this!
Knuth, now Kernigan!
Quick, go get Ken Thompson!! And Stallman. And Joy.
EDIT... didn't feel right not mentioning Ritchie... RIP, man.
Definitely going to start calling WSL "whistle" now. I hope it catches on lol
Lex and Brian are two very intelligent, creative and humble persons. What a fantastic podcast! Brian looks very, very fresh for his age.
Lex, if you code assembly language all the time you get into a groove. I coded assembly for commercial games into the 90s. It's difficult but not as hard as you think.
If you code C all the time you get into a groove. I then had to go back to python (which I already knew) because school was teaching python ... its very difficult and non-intuitive, at least for the first few days
@@anant6778 I have definitely been in the C groove before.
@@RhettAnderson Would You agree that Python syntax and structure is non-intuitive to developers from most other languages ?
Well, it doesn't have C syntax.
@@RhettAnderson To be very honest, thats not my gripe, but using whitespace and indentation as syntax rather than just good practise for readability is where my contentions lie. Its atrocious.
"I use Emacs." Oh, Lex, I thought we could be friends... (cries in vim)
Brian Kernighan is one of the most influential leaders in Computer Science of all time!