Brian Kernighan's Home Page | Hacker News Reader

Brian Kernighan's Home Page

cs.princeton.edu

128 pointsmehdix67 comments

I was at Princeton once (maybe 15 or 20 years ago) for a meeting with one of the startups that spun out of one of their graduate programs.. The guys asked to meet me at the CS building (which was pretty cool to actually be in because I could have never gotten into Princeton as an undergrad!). Anyway, I'm walking down the hall and I see a door that says 'Brian Kernighan'.. I turned and asked them if that was 'THE Brian Kernighan'? they chuckled and said 'yeah..that's him'. I couldn't believe it.. I wish I had met him.. but it was pretty cool to see the guy just walking around.. talking in his office, etc. This guy had a huge part in inventing something that runs most of the networked world.. and there he was.

For someone like Kernighan, the end of the inscription on Christopher Wren's resting place -- ie, St Paul's, in London -- is entirely appropriate:

SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE

"If you seek his monument, look around you."

That's something I really miss. Having studied and worked in a developing country, I learned too late about these giants and it took me years to grasp the philosophy behind their great works and literally _unlearn_ and _relearn_ things. It is IMO a privilege to be exposed to great minds early in your education and carreer.

> took me years to grasp the philosophy behind their great works and literally _unlearn_ and _relearn_ things

What did you have to unlearn and relearn?

> It is IMO a privilege to be exposed to great minds early in your education and carreer.

It's a lot of hard work to get exposed to these individuals. Getting into Princeton is no small feat.

> What did you have to unlearn and relearn?

Twenty years ago I worked for 6 months in India as a consultant intern to Indian programmers. My experience is that Indian programmers are very gifted and clever but caught in everyday hustle. They tend to work chaotically, misunderstand requirements and lack long-term and fundamental thinking. I understand that because as I experienced it myself they had to fight with everyday annoying nuisances like power going off unpredictably. I had the luxury of a laptop (then a high-end 486 Compaq one) so I could shutdown at leisure but I vividly remember the many times light going off suddenly the nights and everybody moaning.

We were programming in server-side JavaScript, many years before Node was a thing.

I imagine GP meant unlearning short-term thinking.

> They tend to work chaotically, misunderstand requirements and lack long-term and fundamental thinking

That's something I had never considered. It's probably the traits I value the most when looking back to what makes an engineer successful.

> they had to fight with everyday annoying nuisances like power going off unpredictably.

They know they could just get an UPS right? They are pretty cheap.

I was a lowly CS undergrad at Princeton, never even took Kernighan’s class but spoke with him a few times in passing. On graduation day, my father was standing around in the back and struck up a conversation with him, oblivious that this was the legend of the department. Yet even so, they had a great conversation and Kernighan even slipped in some nice things to say about me. So on top of everything, he’s also an extraordinarily kind and humble man.

Just replying to the top comment in the hopes that this'll get seen: He's doing a keynote for linux.conf.au this year: https://old.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/riwm4x/brianwkernigha...

This reminds me of the time when I was contractor at IBM Research. Right around the corner from my office there was an office with a tag "Benoit Mandelbrot" and a few doors further down there was the name of one of the Gang of Four. Never saw either of them unfortunately :-(

I was reading "The C Programming Language" as a teenager, probably around 1994. I had a question, so I looked up Brian Kernighan's email* and wrote him. Ten minutes later I had a well written answer that explained my issue. It didn't seem like a big deal to teenage me, but now - wow, that was the magic of the early internet.

* There is a small chance I am remembering this wrong, and I'd written Dennis Ritchie instead. I know I wrote to either K or R :)

Someone once advised me that I should do this when so moved. Since then I have emailed various luminaries, and I don't think I've yet failed to get a helpful response. Anything from a URL, to a sentence, to 2 paragraphs.

Similar thing here, but the email was to P.J. Plauger. At the time he was the editor of C/C++ User's Journal and I had a question about something I read there, and shot him an email. Didn't really expect anything of it, but I got a helpful reply.

This follows the classical Prof. Dr. Style of academic websites: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

Unfortunately many of the examples in the article have since been replaced by boring template website from the university or institute.

I still prefer this "raw" HTML style and use it to provide information about my own courses instead of the stupid and dysfunctional "learning management system" (Blackboard) that our university wants us to use.

It's much faster to add information to the handwritten web page than to use the Javascript GUI mess and this also makes it much easier for students to discover information.

Doug McIlroy: https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/ Tom Duff (not a professor though): iq0.com

> MY NAME IS BEING USED IN A PHISHING ATTACK. > DO NOT RESPOND TO MAIL OFFERING MONEY FOR UNDERGRAD RESEARCH ASSISTANTS.

I wonder if that's been effective. I suppose the targets are students at Princeton so once repeated enough, on his web page and elsewhere, it'll make using his name less profitable.

considering how many people commenting on HN didn't notice it and commenting on something different I don't think it will be much effective - this headline is quite hard to notice for people who are banner blind.

Incredible man, just like his coworkers as Bell. All of that Bell Labs team is fantastic. Obvious Ritchie and Thompson are top dogs in our minds, but McIlroy and Cherry, and the rest of the gang that I don't know the name of are part of such an incredible part of CS history.

Kernighan is an excellent writer and in every interview I've ever seen, he's the most humble man you could imagine. Him and Ritchie taught me C, and to that I am appreciative.

> and the rest of the gang that I don't know the name of are part of such an incredible part of CS history.

For CS-historic significance the ones I would add would be Aho and Steve Johnson.

I appreciate that many CS heavyweights have such plain webpages. Stallman and Larry Wall are some other examples.

It seems to almost be a "brand." Many tech heavyweights have these raw HTML pages.

It says "I'm so busy doing stuff that makes a difference, that I won't dedicate time to eye-candy. You know who I am. I don't need to tell you that."

I can't really argue with that.

I think the reason is that the original intention behind HTML was to be a quickly written markup language to present and share research. With minimal styling like text size, paragraphs, some bold or italics for emphasis and images. Anything going beyond that is for commercial rather than academic purposes.

To add to that, markup was intended to be semantic, not for layout, and the expectation was the browser would do the right thing to present it to the user. I think you are right that they are in that early mindset before browser decided to become pixel perfect typesetting engines. Why should I tell you how wide a <paragraph> should be?!? Browser knows best if it's on a small monitor, big monitor, phone, etc. Sigh.

I always assumed it was down to them creating their homepages early on (as in: the mid-to-late 90s) and having gotten used to editing the raw HTML file using vi/emacs/ed/whatever when they needed to update it. And they never had a reason to change that workflow.

My oldest, still active, website was created in that style around 20 years ago and only in recent years did I change to a git and ansible based deployment instead of just editing the raw files on the server over ssh.

I think even if he had time, he wouldn't change that page much. _simplicity_ is his philosophy. A page that you can edit with the most basic tools and publish in terminal is totally aligned with that. The page does its job, anything else is unnecessary clutter.

I mean you can't argue with it. If you want a page like this, you only need to know HTML, FTP, a text editor.

Meanwhile my attempted personal website, 'simply' github pages, also requires you to know about Hugo, which requires a ruby runtime locally; markdown, css, js, Git, Github, Github's two-factor authentication, etc.

I mean it won't win any design awards but basic html for infrequently updated websites is absolutely fine.

Unstyled or almost unstyled HTML home page is basically standard practice among (especially older) academics, CS or not. Don Knuth's home page with custom colors is almost elaborately designed by academic standards.

> Don Knuth's home page with custom colors is almost elaborately designed by academic standards

Yeah, or Tanenbaum's.

You’re seeing (and falling for) an ego-trip that is not there. All CS professors have webpages like this one.

This is 100% the case. I wouldn't be surprised if universities actually have a policy against not customizing profile pages. Otherwise you're opening things up to the good old Geocities age.

Sigh... was the personal attack really necessary?

I see these pages, all the time, with tech heavyweights that aren't teachers. I won't bother tracking them down, but I've been seeing them for years.

I don't think it's an ego-trip. These folks really are that busy, and this stuff just isn't important. Some, however, I am sure, have ego trips. I don't really care. I'm not inviting them over for dinner, and they probably wouldn't come, if I did.

The ego trip is more with sites like mine, where I take the time to polish it up. It's more important to me, than it is to them.

Some of them actually have fairly current-looking pages, because they work[ed] for companies (or schools) that have templates[0].

Also, he isn't my "hero." I mean, seriously...

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150312003109/http://research.g...

It's the equivalent of senior law firm partners leaving simple typos in their emails to junior staff.

Way too wide paragraphs to be read comfortably on a standard Full HD monitor. I.e. form over function in order to achieve that vaunted “pragmatic and old school” aesthetic.

EDIT: On second thought though it seems that people are reading too much into it and just projecting this “branding” onto their hero (see my other comment in this thread). Ironically yes: they probably are too busy to craft their homepages in such a way that people on HN will be impressed by their couldn’t-care-less attitude!

> Way too wide paragraphs to be read comfortably on a standard Full HD monitor.

That's the users fault.

The Unix Way. I love it.

Most web pages aren't designed to be viewed on a full-width browser window for the exact reason you said.

Point of order: Resizable windows are the Xerox PARC way.

You know that you can change a browser window's size? The alternative is a thin strip of text with enormous margins, which I find about as annoying as overly long lines. Written pages aren't really mean to be displayed in very wide windows.

I didn’t know that you can resize windows.

Seriously though I have Firefox’ Reader Mode for subpar websites.

Doesn't HN give you paragraphs just as wide?

Shoot… :-)

Not surprising, really.

At their core, many of these people rose to prominence in an earlier era, before the web even existed. Most of their personal pages reflect this. The people Brian worked with at Bell Labs really were (first and foremost) programmers and probably either wrote their personal pages with simple HTML or used a tool to generate it from some other language. As a result it's usually not very pretty.

Stroustrup is a slight exception, as his page at Morgan Stanley is quite "corporate-looking"[1], but his personal site is very much in the same vein as the others.

When you think of the Old Guard of the web, it's usually names like Zeldman, Meyer, Marcotte, et al that have anything which resembles the web as we know it today.

[1]: https://www.morganstanley.com/profiles/bjarne-stroustrup-man...

My uni faculty had those until like 2015. They were awesome and everything was instant. Easy access old exams or querky fun programs etc.

Later the uni forced their crappy content management system on everyone and it was a login required bloated JS mess instead.

And the faculty staff never bothered to write bios or interesting stuff there.

Eh, this looks like most academic personal pages, heavy or lightweight. Some promo of their books, minimal content and links to papers or presentations that are at least 2 years behind the current year (whatever the current year is).

Some of it is probably generational. Kernighan will be 80 this year. Ritchie, gone now 10 years, was a little older.

Wall and Stallman are a generation younger -- true Boomers, if you will, born in the 50s.

The computing topics tackled by those generations were foundational, but they also predate the web as a Thing. So they're ON the web, to one degree or another, but it's not their focus.

By the time you get to the next gen of folks -- and let's just use GenX as the label; I mean folks born in the early 60s through about 1980 -- the people making contributions have the web as a MAJOR component of the computing landscape. These folks are "web native," and so it makes sense that they'd have fancier web pages/sites because the tools and technologies for doing such things are part of their remit, or at least close to it. Twiddling with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was a big deal for a long time, and it showed in the pages of folks like (say) Eric Meyer.

I'm 51, born in 1970. I don't think I ever saw a web presence for anyone more than about 5 years older than I am that was elaborate, or the sadly-now-withdrawn-from-public-life Mark Pilgrim.

I like the plainness in general, but on contemporary monitors, this means that lines of text are very long, causing eye fatigue pretty quickly.

Typography is an art way more ancient than computers and I feel that it should be taken into account even on webpages; famously, Donald Knuth studied typography pretty deeply when designing TeX.

This is from the old school of thought on the web, the HTML is only about content and semantics, and all the typography should be left to the browser (and user preferences). If the default font in your browser causes fatigue for you, you can change the defaults. This is hardly possible with most websites now without intrusive browser extensions.

Works on any screen, desk, mobile. Works in Lynx from the command line.

Just narrow your window, maybe by changing the width of your sidebar.

Just double click on Safari's title bar and the window will automatically adjust it's width.

For those that don't know who Brian Kernighan is: basically, he's one of the founders of the UNIX operating system with Bell Laboratories, and a significant early contributor to the C programming language: among other amazing accomplishments that literally all of us touch in one way shape or form today.

> significant early contributor to the C programming language

source? http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?I=info.Brian_Kernighan says that

> Kernighan has said that he had no part in the design of the C language: "It's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work".

He did help write the first device-independent troff (The original by Joe Ossanna only worked with one specific type of computer-controlled typesetter.) and helped write the K&R C book, and the K in AWK is him, too.

Helping to write K&R C would make him a "significant early contributor to the C programming language" to many people here.

eh, I suppose that's fair.

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the students only know him as Prof. Kernighan. CS majors are certainly nerds, but most of the stuff that made Brian famous happened well before they were born.

Quite a second act, if you think about it.

Don't forget plan9 and golang

Kernighans Books are the gold-standard I measure all instructional textbooks against.

In addition to the books, he's the 'k' in the awk programming language and he came up with the name Unix.

Dunno. IMO, the only good thing that can be said about The C Programing Language is that it's short. The AWK Programming Language, on the other hand, is indeed a classic.

The shortness is what makes it great. I recall going through a couple of thick C books, not getting anywhere. Until I picked up the K&R book, and was writing usable C within a couple weeks.

I knew that he was one of the coauthors of the Go book, but surprised to learn that he's written more books after that! What a career.

Great video of Brian Kernighan & friends at Bell Labs explaining the UNIX system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

The PhishBowl page it links to is great! https://informationsecurity.princeton.edu/phish-bowl

Nice! just put "Unix: A History and a Memoir" in my Amazon cart.

Fantastic book. It's a genre that's lacking, but this is in my top 2 CS history books (up there with The Dream Machine, but that's a lot of hardware as well).

Try a “Soul of a New Machine” which is similar but focused on hardware.

looking forward to it then. I always appreciate the prose of the K&R C book, which was the first programming book I ever read.

Did not knew Brian Kernighan has authored so many books. This is useful.

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