- He co-created AWK (he's the K) and AMPL
- He literally wrote the book on C with Dennis Ritchie (the book with the big blue "C" on it)
- He authored some of the first UNIX programs (cron, for example) when he was working at Bell Labs
- He made "Hello World!" a trope and named UNIX
He's also quite possibly the nicest person ever.
In my tiny little world, K&R is like a bazillion times more well-known than AWK. Always fun with different perspectives. :)
This. (Had to break HN protocol here)
Let me recount an anecdote from the past, its from an old comment of mine:
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Navigating Google was such a nerd minefield, but in the best possible way. The excited student that I was, I ended up lecturing about longest common subsequence to Thomas Szymanski not knowing his association with the history of diff on Unix. Same thing happened with SVM's, I was explaining its merits and demerits to Corinna Cortes, my other cube neighbor, not knowing she was the first author of the paper on SVMs. Not only would they not take offence they would all keep indulging.
Then one day I step out for a break, a senior person whom I recognized because had a cube on the row behind mine, approaches me, apologizing profusely and ad infinitum that he had got locked out, could I please let him in. No big deal for me, but he just would not stop apologizing and thanking me with such striking sincerity. A few days later a co-intern asks me if I knew that guy. I said sure, "I let him in once, he sits one row behind me". He says, "No, do you know who he is ?" He asked me to checkout the name tag on his cube. I saunter off, "Brian Kernighan" !
An important takeaway of this internship was to experience the humility of all these people, and the sense that you are surrounded by such iconic stalwarts in CS and you wouldn't even know...
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I hope he'll be as active as he was in the presentation for many, many more years!