After reading The C Programming Language 2nd Edition by Brian Kernighan, and Dennis Ritchie I instantly became a fan of the language and the authors.
The writing style in the book is particularly remarkable.
It’s hard to put into words, but as I was reading it it felt like K & R - as they’ve come to be known - managed to make each sentence contain all the necessary information needed to perfectly understand the subject in simple terms making the sentence no longer than it needed to be.
As brief context, K & R were colleagues at Bell Labs. Ritchie was the inventor of the C Programming. Another colleague at Bell Labs, Ken Thompson, invented the Unix Operating system - the precursor to Linux.
Bell Labs was clearly a special place in the history of Computing.
It has many notable alumni with many Nobel Prizes, and Turing Awards being awarded to its researchers.
Ken Thompson went on to create the Go Programming language with Rob Pike, another former Bell Labs researcher, and Robert Griesemer. Go is a language which I began learning this year and I find it really enjoyable to work with. These guys know what they’re doing.
I’ve timestamped the video above to start at a point where Brian Kernighan explains the simplicity of the Unix operating system with a demonstration of shell pipes. I find his style here to personifies the book.
The video above also features Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and should be watched in its entirety.
In fact, that entire Youtube channel is a gold mine of computer science history and knowledge.
The book and the above video sent me down a rabbit hole of exploring the brilliant Bell Labs alumni. Below are some other pieces of content I feel grateful to have come across:
- Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan at VCF East 2019
- Brian Kernighan’s appearance on the Lex Fridman Podcast, Episode #109
- Rob Pike’s chimming in on the developments of Generics in Go on Reddit. I like how he is active in the community on Reddit, sharing his insights.