Princeton Tech Meetup #14 w/ Brian Kernighan

Speaker Series

Keynote: Brian Kernighan, Department of Comp Sci, Princeton University -

Topic: How to succeed in language design without really trying

Why do some languages succeed, while others fall by the wayside? I've helped create nearly a dozen languages over the years; a handful are still in widespread use, while others have languished or simply disappeared. I've also been present at the creation of several others, including some really major ones. In this talk I'll give my humble but correct opinion on factors that affect success and failure, and try to offer some insight into what to do if you're trying to design a new language yourself, and why that might be a good thing.

Agenda:

7:00 - Arrival - Snacks, Pizza and Networking.

7:30 - Introduction / Announcements by the organizers.

7:40 - Keynote: Brian Kernighan

8:40 - Open-mic to quickly promote your business or broadcast a need that someone in the group might be able to fill.

8:45 - Wrap-Up, discussion of Meetup, feedback and opportunities for improvement or future topics.

8:55 - End of formal part of meeting.

9:00 - Exit Venue and head to After Hours Party - Location: TBA

More about Brian Kernighan

"He said, "Let's go.""

a "hello"; b "world'*; v[2] "now is the time", "for all good men", "to come to the aid of the party";

Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix.

He is currently a Professor at the Computer Science Department of Princeton University, where he is also the Undergraduate Department Representative.

He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The 'K' of K&R C and the 'K' in AWK both stand for 'Kernighan'. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan has said that he had no part in the design of the C language ("it's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work").

He authored many Unix programs, including ditroff, and cron for Version 7 Unix. In collaboration with Shen Lin he devised well-known heuristics for two NP-complete optimization problems: graph partitioning and the travelling salesman problem. (In a display of authorial equity, the former is usually called the Kernighan–Lin algorithm, while the latter is styled Lin–Kernighan.) He was the software editor for Prentice Hall International. His "Software Tools" series spread the essence of 'C/Unix thinking' with makeovers for BASIC, FORTRAN, and Pascal - and most notably his 'Ratfor' (rational FORTRAN) was put in the public domain. He has said that if stranded on an island with only one programming language it would have to be C.

He coined the term Unix in the 1970s. The original term he coined was Unics (for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service, a play on Multics), which was later changed to Unix. Kernighan is also known as a coiner of the expression "What You See Is All You Get (WYSIAYG)", which is a sarcastic variant of the original "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG). Kernighan's term is used to indicate that WYSIWYG systems might throw away information in a document that could be useful in other contexts.