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Comment by cmollis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 :-(

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