#109 – Brian Kernighan: UNIX, C, AWK, AMPL, and Go Programming

Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University. He co-authored the C Programming Language with Dennis Ritchie (creator of C) and has written a lot of books on programming, computers, and life including the Practice of Programming, the Go Programming Language, his latest UNIX: A History and a Memoir. He co-created AWK, the text processing language used by Linux folks like myself. He co-designed AMPL, an algebraic modeling language for large-scale optimization. Support this podcast by supporting our sponsors: – Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/lex – Raycon: http://buyraycon.com/lex If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter , LinkedIn , Facebook , Medium , or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts , follow on Spotify , or support it on Patreon . Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 – Introduction 04:24 – 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