Language Design with Brian Kernighan

“The best computer science is the kind where the theory is inspired by some practical problem, you develop a better theoretical understanding of what you want to do, and that feeds back into better practice.”

Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the author of several books, including “The Go Programming Language” and “The C Programming Language”, a book more commonly referred to as K&R. Professor Kernighan also worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix.

Questions

• What are the timeless characteristics that define a successful programming language?
• How did people categorize languages 50 years ago?
• What would people have been posting on Hacker News in 1965?
• Why is Java so popular, and why do you think it’s strongly hyped?
• Computers have become more powerful over time – how has this affected language design?
• What are your thoughts on JavaScript?
• What did you learn while writing a book about Go?
• What did you learn about programming and life from working with Dennis Ritchie?

Links

• How to succeed in language design without really trying
• JavaScript: The Definitive Guide
• JavaScript: The Good Parts
• The Go Programming Language
• Plan 9
• The C Programming Language (K&R)
• Brian’s professor page

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Pranay