Lex Fridman interviews Brian Kernighan in the latest episode of his podcast.

Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University. He co-authored the C Programming Language with Dennis Ritchie (creator of C) and has written a lot of books on programming, computers, and life including the Practice of Programming, the Go Programming Language, his latest UNIX: A History and a Memoir. He co-created AWK, the text processing language used by Linux folks like myself. He co-designed AMPL, an algebraic modeling language for large-scale optimization. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.

Outline:

• 0:00 – Introduction
• 4:24 – UNIX early days
• 22:09 – Unix philosophy
• 31:54 – Is programming art or science?
• 35:18 – AWK
• 42:03 – Programming setup
• 46:39 – History of programming languages
• 52:48 – C programming language
• 58:44 – Go language
• 1:01:57 – Learning new programming languages
• 1:04:57 – Javascript
• 1:08:16 – Variety of programming languages
• 1:10:30 – AMPL
• 1:18:01 – Graph theory
• 1:22:20 – AI in 1964
• 1:27:50 – Future of AI
• 1:29:47 – Moore’s law
• 1:32:54 – Computers in our world
• 1:40:37 – Life