"the following is a conversation with Brian Kernighan a professor of computer science at Princeton University he was a"

"science at Princeton University he was a key figure in the computer science community in the early UNIX days alongside UNIX creators Ken Thompson and"

"alongside UNIX creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie he co-authored the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie the creator of C and has written a lot"

"the creator of C and has written a lot of books on programming computers and life including the practice of programming the goal programming language and his latest UNIX a history and a memoir he co-c..."

"and a memoir he co-created awk the text processing language used by Linux folks like myself he Co designed ample an algebraic modeling language that I personally love and have used a lot in"

"personally love and have used a lot in my life for large scale optimization I think I can keep going for a long time"

"think I can keep going for a long time with his creations and accomplishments which is funny because given all that he's one of the most humble and kind people I've spoken to on this podcast quick sum..."

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"method of listening to podcasts audiobooks and music when I run do the push ups and pull ups that have begun to"

"push ups and pull ups that have begun to hate at this point or just living life in fact I often listen to brown noise"

"in fact I often listen to brown noise with these what I'm thinking deeply"

"about what could you do if you're going to design a new operating system that would provide the same kind of comfortable computing as cts s head but also the facilities of something like multics sort ..."

"little used if you can sort of comment what do you think it's like to write an operating system like that so that process that Ken went through in three weeks because you were I mean you're part of th..."

"in some other way quit what was the code written in the primarily the programming language was it in assembly pdp-7 assembler that Ken created these things were assembly language until probably the ca..."

"in a particular time you know the time matters to the timing of when that person comes along and the a wife does have to leave see like there's this weird timing that happens that and then all sudden ..."

"person that would be can see if written in you book UNIX a history and a memoir are there some memorable human stories funny or profound from that time they just kind of stand out oh there's a lot of ..."

"control but it wasn't designed for that it was used extensively as a front end for big other systems big dumb systems but it wasn't designed for that it was meant to be an environment where it was rea..."

"you're part of that community of programmers so what was the like writing programs on that early unix it was a blast it really was you know I like to program I'm not a terribly good programmer but it ..."

"communication we need that feedback loop I mean this is before the internet certainly before the internet um it was mostly physical right there you know somebody would come into your office and say so..."

"of getting that quick feedback working together there's so many brilliant people I don't know where else that could have existed in the world I've been given how that came together what yeah well how ..."

"code contributions notably from people like Bill joy that eventually it was able to become completely free of any TMT code now there was an enormous amount of legal jockeying around this that in the l..."

"they went throughout the world and permeated in that kind of way so what kind of features do you think made for a good operating system if you take the lessons of Unix you said like you know make it e..."

"fundamental form is extremely straightforward and that means that you can write code very very effectively from for the file system and then one of those ideas and one of those generalizations is that..."

"science there's a creativity or kind of rigor I think it's some of each it's some combination some of the art is figuring out what it is that did you really want to do what should that program be what..."

"about whereas if you think of yourself as a scientist well you can maybe push them over their horizon in a way and if you're an artist what's that so just on your own personal level what's your proces..."

"be very small sometimes you're not even programming you're just using existing tools like counting things or sometimes you're writing awk scripts because two or three lines will tell you something abo..."

"data you know that keeps that seems to work still yeah it's very good for that kind of thing that's sort of what it was meant for I think what we didn't appreciate was that the model is actually quite..."

"you love about arc like is there if you can comment on sort of things that give you joy when you can in a simple program reveal something about it is there something that stands out from particular fe..."

"right there and the interaction with Allah perfectly is there other shell commands that you love over the years like you really enjoy using don't major does everything so grep is a kind of what is it ..."

"not strictly unique but it's certainly focused there and I think some of its the weight of history that Windows came from ms-dos ms-dos was a pretty pathetic operating system although common own and y..."

"okay what's your perfect programming setup what computer what operating system want keyboard what editor yeah perfect is too strong a word is way to struggle read of what by default I have a at this p..."

"so in ancient ancient times like call it the first time sharing systems going back to what we're talking about there were editors there was an editor on C TSS that I don't even remember what it was ca..."

"so if you changed the line you had to print that line using up another line of paper to see what changed cause okay yeah so when thing when CRT displays came along yeah then you could start to use cur..."

"you take on the impossible task and give a brief history of programming languages from your perspective so I guess you could say programming languages started probably in what the late 40s or somethin..."

"happened in the late 50s was people realize you could play this game again and you could move up a level in writing or creating languages that were closer to the way the real people might think about ..."

"so it puts the power of programming to the hands of people like you yeah anybody who wants to who under to invest some time in learning a programming language and is not then tied to a particular kind..."

"that and then what happens after that you get things like object-oriented programming languages because as you write programs in a language like C at some point scale gets to you and it's too hard to ..."

"things fit on each other in a positive cycle what did it take to write sort of a definitive book probably the definitive book on all of programs like it's more definitive to a particular language than..."

"is the power of example I mean you're you're the creator at least one of the first people to do the hello world program just like the example if aliens discover our civilization hundreds of years from..."

"you can comment before or maybe comments on what do you find where does go stood in this broad spectrum of languages and also how do you yourself feel about this wide range of powerful interesting lan..."

"from my experience um with some languages is very positive like Lua a scripting language I'd never used and I took my Britain little program the program is a trivial formatter it just takes in lines o..."

"one of the issues you have to have something you want to do if you don't have something that is the right combination if I want to do it and yet I have enough disposable time whatever to make it worse..."

"theirs this may be to get your comment on something which javascript and actually most languages of Python such a big part of the experience of programming with those languages includes libraries sort..."

"speaking to the variety of languages do you think that variety is good or do you hope think that over time we should converge towards one two three programming languages that's you mentioned to the ba..."

"with functions as first-class citizens and pattern based languages and gee I don't know closures and just on and on and on lambdas interesting ideas that showed up first in let's call it broadly the f..."

"describe what is the ample language sure so ample is a language for mathematical programming technical term think of it as linear programming that is setting up systems of linear equations that are so..."

"actual solvers the optimization systems that do the solving then you can have other people come to the table and then build their solvers whether it's linear or nonlinear convex non convex that kind o..."

"is a very very very intricate very large and very sparse matrix where the various components of the model are distributed among the coefficients in a way that is totally on obvious to anybody and so w..."

"with at the same time as you say that model and the data are separate thing so one model would then work with all kinds of different data in the same way lots of programs do the same thing but with di..."

"wrote a couple of versions of a book on which is one of the greatest books ever written I love that book I don't know why it's an excellent book but for wrote most of it and so it's really really well..."

"UNIX Iago laying all the things we talked about all the amazing work you've done you've also done working graph theory let me ask this this crazy out there question if you had to make a bet and I had ..."

"stuff the last time I touched anything to do with that was before it was invented because I it's literally true I did my PhD thesis on good for big on on tape you know absolutely before I I did this i..."

"just about the time that Steve Cooke was showing that there were classes of problems that appeared to be really hard of witchcraft partitioning was one but this my expertise such as it was totally pre..."

"has that poem where you choose two paths so what why did you is there another alternate universe in which you pursued the Don Knuth path of you know algorithm designs and of not smart enough that's sm..."

"that in Toronto as an undergrad you did a senior thesis or literature survey on artificial intelligence this was 1964 correct what was the AI landscape ideas dreams at that time I think that was one o..."

"I we finally do play games like go and chess and so on better than then people do but there are others on machine translation is a lot better than it you to be but that's 50 close to 60 years of progr..."

"your thoughts on this new summer of AI now in the work with machine learning in your networks you've kind of mentioned he started to try to explore and look into this world that seems fundamentally di..."

"yeah that's an optimistic point of view and if it works that way that would be absolutely great and and what I don't know is whether it does work that way or whether the the you know the AI mechanisms..."

"talked to Jim Keller and he says so he actually describes he argues that the Moore's law will continue for a long long time because you mentioned the atom we actually have I think a thousandfold incre..."

"some areas at least which is that more programming will be done by programs than by people and that more will be done by sort of declarative rather than procedural mechanisms where I say I want this t..."

"that experience what advice do you have for people who don't know anything about programming but I'm kind of curious about this world or programming seems to become more and more of a fundamental skil..."

"program Wow that's okay just if you were to give a flavor to people of the programming world for the competing world what what are the examples it should go with so a little bit of assembly to get a s..."

"people program there's engineers they wrote wrote those things yeah right and so in a way I'm expecting them to make an enormous conceptual leap from their 5 or 10 line toy assembly language thing tha..."

"think everywhere in the world yeah the the long-term effect on political systems and so on it's who knows knows indeed the the the people now have a voice which is a powerful thing people who are pres..."

"was an honor okay likes it my pleasure good fun thank you for listening to this conversation with Brian Kernighan and thank you to our sponsors 8:00 sleep mattress and rake on earbuds please consider ..."