Back in March, John Mashey interviewed Brian Kernighan at Princeton about his career and technical work. It’s a wonderful video that covers his career from his undergraduage years to his current position as a professor at Princeton. We’ve heard some of the stories before but there was a lot in the video that I didn’t know.
If you’re a Unix-head you’ll enjoy the discussion of the extraordinary culture that the Bell Labs researchers enjoyed and how it changed for the worse after divestiture. If you’re into the Go language you’ll appreciate his take on the Go language and the things it got right that most languages haven’t.
If you’re an educator, you’ll be interested in what he has to say about teaching Computer Science classes today and some of the problems he has to deal with. Kernighan developed—and still teaches—what amounts to a “Computer Science for Poets” course. That grew out of his experience teaching a semester at Harvard during a sabbatical while he was still at Bell Labs. The class had students ranging from the wunderkind freshman who had—as Kernighan says—been programming from the time they were in utero to terrified Senior English majors trying to fulfill a science prerequisite. Kernighan felt that those English majors weren’t being well served and set out to change that when he got to Princeton.
The video is long, just short of an hour and 15 minutes but it’s very much worthwhile taking some time to watch. Kernighan is always interesting and is an inspiration. It also serves as a sort of snapshot of the history of our field because his career spans most of that history. Indeed, he helped make some of it himself.