Computerphile has a another wonderful discussion between David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan. We are quickly reaching the time when all the original Unix people will be gone (Kernighan is 79 or 80) so these chats are our last chance to get an oral history of what it was like in the beginning.
This particular chat is about AWK. I thought that by now everyone knew that the K in AWK stands for Kernighan but judging from the comments, apparently not. AWK dates back to the 1970s and is still maintained—even the original AWK—as well as the GNU version GAWK. It’s my favorite scripting language and tremendously powerful for problems in its domain.
One of the things Kernighan revealed in the video is that he’s recently spent some time in making (the original) AWK work with Unicode and that his summer vacation project is to update the AWK Book, which if you follow the video link you’ll learn is from 1988. It’s still available but at a outrageous price so a new version would be very welcome, especially to younger engineers who may not have access to the original.
I always enjoy these Brailsford/Kernighan chats and inevitably come away from them knowing something I didn’t know before. In an age where many people in the field don’t know that Kernighan is the K in AWK or even that he’s the K in K&R, these videos become more important than ever.