#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