As you all know, I’m a big fan of Brian Kernighan. He’s not only the co-author of the iconic K&R book on C but also wrote a lot of of the Unix utilities that we all depend on today. Not least among those is the AWK utility. It’s one of the premier examples of a a little language or a domain specific language.
Kernighan is a master of the genre and has generated lots of examples, big and small. Even today, he maintains and improves the original AWK. Here’s a (very) short interview with Kernighan about his developmemt of little languages.
Kernighan, in his usual self-effacing way, downplays how innovative his inventions were. He says that associative arrays, while newish, were already pretty well known and the pattern/action paradigm underlying the AWK workflow was also known if not widely used at the time. In any event, he says, yacc and lex made it all easy.
Kernighan is a treasure and one of the few remaining people who were there at the beginning of Unix and can tell us stories of what it was like. The linked interview will take you less than a minute to read and is very much worth your while. Take a minute to spend some time with one of the luminaries of our craft.