Brian Kernighan

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Brian Wilson Kernighan (pronounced Ker'-ni-han; the 'g' is silent; born 1942) is a computer scientist who worked at the Bell Labs and contributed to the design of the pioneering AWK and AMPL programming languages. He is also the author of the famous Hello, world program.

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.

In collaboration with Shen Lin he devised well-known approximation algorithms 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.)

Kernighan was also 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.

The "K" of K&R C and the "K" in the name AWK mean "Kernighan."

He was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and received his Bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University, where since 2000 he has held a professorship in the department of computer science.

[edit] Summary of Achievements

Hello, world, a program originally written in B to demonstrate B's extrn variables (equivalent to C's extern)
The AWK programming language, along with Al Aho and Peter Weinberger, and its book The AWK Programming Language
The AMPL programming language
The book The Practice of Programming
Software Tools, a book and set of tools for C and Pascal, cocreated with P. J. Plauger
The Unix Programming Environment, a tutorial book along with Rob Pike
The C Programming Language, along with Dennis Ritchie (C's creator), which was the 1st ever guide to C
The pic typesetting language for troff
The eqn typesetting language for troff, along with Lorinda Cherry
The Principles of Programming, also with Rob Pike
Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language, a popular criticism of the Pascal programming language by Niklaus Wirth. Some parts of the criticism are obsolete due to ISO 7185 (Programming Languages - Pascal), the criticism was written before ISO 7185 was even created. See below for a link. (AT&T Computing Science Technical Report #100)
ditroff
The m4 macro processing language, with Dennis Ritchie