Brian Kernighan Reflects on "The Practice of Programming"
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ส.ค. 2024
- In this very special episode of Book Overflow, Dr. Brian Kernighan, the author of "The Practice of Programming" joins us to discuss his experience writing the book! Tune in as he talks about his experience at Bell Labs, what it was like co-authoring the book with Rob Pike, his thoughts on LLMs and the future of programming, and more!
Link to the original discussion of the book here: • Discussing "The Practi...
Book Overflow is a podcast for software engineers, by software engineers dedicated to improving our craft by reading the best technical books in the world. Join Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups as they read and discuss a new technical book each week!
The full book schedule and links to every major podcast player can be found at bookoverflow.io
Chapter Markers:
00:00 - Intro
02:38 - Why write this book?
12:23 - Working at Bell Labs
16:29 - Life Learning Process
22:33 - What motivates you to write a book?
28:13 - AI and LLMs
35:48 - Layers of Abstraction
37:50 - What excites you about the future?
41:34 - Programmatic Thinking in Humanities
50:13 - Favorite Books
57:39 - Closing Thoughts
What a wonderful way to start your Thursday: a cup of coffee and some wisdom from Brian Kernighan. Thank you guys 🫶
24:16 - it's so very nice to hear Brian saying this. I very much feel this way, as well, and sometimes I feel like I'm alone in it -- I often have trouble finding folks who want to work this way, but when I do, it's _sooooo_ much easier and (in my opinion) better (of an experience, if not also better output). So much easier to work together... I wish it was more common, but I'm super glad to hear it talked about by someone like Brian Kernighan!
That's a real legend over there!! Glad to see one of the programming wizards still sharing knowledge 🙏🏽
It was honestly absurdly generous of him to come onto our podcast as we're just beginning. He's a great man!
Great interview, Brian is such a warm personality and he feels like one of those people who has never lost his interest in things. I hope he enjoys his holiday!
I know there's little you can do about it, but in general I wish remote podcast guests had better audio quality than "muffled laptop/webcam mic".
Woah! It's Fred Overflow! Our esteemed ancestor!
And yeah, we would have loved for the audio to be better too, haha. Fun fact: Brian Kernighan's computer was so old that he wasn't able to even run our podcasting software (Riverside) so this is actually just a recording of a Zoom call, making the audio even worse. We'd have loved if it had been crisper, but we were just so honored to have him on the podcast at all and you don't look a gift horse in the mouth!
What makes it worse is the difference in volume. Your recoing is louder so I tune my speakers down, but then I can barely hear the main content. You could try to tune that.
@@Tojot Yeah, we tried to fix it in post, but it obviously wasn't very successful. The next time we run into this we'll try to do a better job.
@@BookOverflowPod I'm talking out of my output buffer here, but IIRC other podcasts will record the audio at the client side (e.g. phone/laptop/etc local recording software) and play a beep before beginning the podcast, and both sides of the audio can be synced in post, and then you have as good a recording as is possible from all sources. (I think sometimes that's made easier by shipping dedicated recording equipment in advance, but there's probably multiple options)
@@BookOverflowPod Have you tried Adobe Enhance on his audio? I think it's salvageable, but too late now obv. But keep it in mind for next time.
Also, $15 wired Apple Earpods are cheap and have great mic audio quality -- send em to guests that don't have mics!
HERE WE GO! Now I'm confused which book to read first. The Practice of Programming or Unix Programming Environment 🤔😁
@@alabhyajindal Can’t go wrong with a Kernighan book!
This is def something I’d be interested in. Talking bout books. Any chance y’all are in the Cambridge MIT areas?
@@in70x No, unfortunately. Carter lives in Utah and Nathan lives in Colorado. Why? Did you have something in mind?
he's 82 btw
@@unixrebel I know! I hope to be as sharp as he is when I’m his age.
You shoulda just sent him a 16 dollar mic from Amazon to guarantee that sound for posterity
I feel vindicated hearing Brian Kernighan say that csv parsing (and the csv specification in general) is still not a great time.
I've seen some csv files recently that made my reevaluate my choice to be s programmer...
@@moatcozza It cracked us up that 25 years after writing the book he still has strong opinions on CSV parsing haha!
best example in history of how not to make a data format: 1) don't allow encoding arbitrary data, 2) don't use strict semantics, 3) don't include a format version, 4) don't allow for extensions, 5) don't include multiple types, 6) don't allow for an index for large data, and 7) wait 33 years to make a specification RFC
@@BookOverflowPod oof, as someone that wrote one in pure awk, it certainly is not great! It took a while to come up with this
/^([^",]*|"([^",]|"")*")*$|^(([^",]*|"([^",]|"")*")*,([^",]*|"([^",]|"")*")*)+$/
and that's still not the full thing. it certainly does look better than that email regex, though. Fortunately awk's RE engine is not capable of that insanity.
It would be nice if you could load the audio into Audacity and normalize the volume real quick.
It would have been cool to leave the video for all 3 visible at all times, I would have liked to see some of his visual reactions to some questions, and I'm only like 15 minutes in. ^>^ nice work though overall.
@@sn0n Agreed! Our usual podcasting software allows that, but Brian’s computer was too old to run it! So this is just a recording of a Zoom call, haha.
If you're interviewing someone as important as Brian Kernighan, you should really really encourage him to use a better microphone. I can't even understand him through a lot of this interview.
one word, like and subscribe
eili5
It annoys me that you mispronounce Brian Kernighan's name. It is pronounced "Kerni-han", where the "g" is silent.
Whoops, you learn something new every day! Sorry, Brian. I wish he had corrected us!
Be annoyed then. No one cares.
@@delian66 You cared enough to reply!
@@etfstrategy-vb2eo He cared about the contents of the message, not how OP felt. Completely different things.