"I found it easier to program when I was trying to figure out the logic for myself rather than trying to figure out where in the infinite stack of documentation was the function I needed. So for me, programming is more like creating something rather than looking it up, and too much of today’s programming is more like looking it up." - K
The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
31–40 of 88 posts
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love Brian Kernighan interviews so I was eager to listen. I have mixed feelings. You would often make a point and then play snippets from him supporting it. You often gave yourself center stage and used him as evidence. I found it overedited and synthetic, more a performance than an interview. I came for BWK and left unsatisfied. If that's the style you were going for, that's fine. Maybe it's just my expectations.…
Oh, I'm sorry you didn't like the format. Thanks for giving it a listen anyhow.
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Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#33This is a great interview, but the most interesting thing I learned is that I've been mispronouncing Brian's name for years. Apparently the 'g' is silent.
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#340:16:40 For those who haven't seen it before, there's a Computerphile video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxeuwlvf8w (related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvwNKpDUkiE ) about the hacking of the typesetting machine, a Mergenthaler Linotron 202. 0:24:31 The photo must be the one at https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/picture.html (probably the webpage, on Dennis Ritchie's old website, that made it famous…
My favourite BWK video is about grep. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTfOnGZUZDk?t=566
The last part is very quotable: "They had one grave disadvantage, none of them were Ken Thompson"
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love Brian Kernighan interviews so I was eager to listen. I have mixed feelings. You would often make a point and then play snippets from him supporting it. You often gave yourself center stage and used him as evidence. I found it overedited and synthetic, more a performance than an interview. I came for BWK and left unsatisfied. If that's the style you were going for, that's fine. Maybe it's just my expectations.…
Oh, I'm sorry you didn't like the format. Thanks for giving it a listen anyhow.
I think the format is good for your podcast, where your listeners would be used to hearing your voice. On Hacker News though, people are a bit more familiar with BWK.
Thank you very much for transcribing the text; it's better to listen, but it's easier to translate to other languages, and also read while looking busy in an office. The audio is better for the Canadian accents though!
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#36For the uninitiated, Brian Kernighan also wrote a book titled "Unix: A History and a Memoir" published in 2019. Would recommend. Goodreads Link - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53011383-unix
I'd also recommend his book, it was an excellent read. Do you know of any more books that are similar? Historical and a little bit "technical"?
The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks about the IBM 360. Some of the essays are more relevant today than others but worth at least selectively reading.
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love Brian Kernighan interviews so I was eager to listen. I have mixed feelings. You would often make a point and then play snippets from him supporting it. You often gave yourself center stage and used him as evidence. I found it overedited and synthetic, more a performance than an interview. I came for BWK and left unsatisfied. If that's the style you were going for, that's fine. Maybe it's just my expectations.…
Oh, I'm sorry you didn't like the format. Thanks for giving it a listen anyhow.
I suppose this is just matter of personal preference, but I'm not a big fan of this style of podcast either - although I did greatly enjoy the episode! I just felt it would have been even better if it were simply a conversation, without jumping back and forth in time, inserting explanations (although they were helpful), etc.
As you said in the podcast - "start at the beginning". If it had then proceeded from the beginning to the middle and from there to the end, I would have found it more relaxing to listen to.
On the other hand, there are some of these heavily edited, radio-style podcasts that lots of people think are amazing but leave me confused and annoyed. So maybe you shouldn't listen to me. :)
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#38Great episode! Now I'm thinking how great it would be to do one with Ken Thompson to hear it from his angle.
There's an oral history of Unix, but all the disfluencies, backtracking, etc, is transcribed so uh
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#39Thanks for submitting this. I did the interview. I think you have to listen to it to get the full experience. But here are some things that were interesting and surprising from the interview: The UNIX room - The unix room at bell labs was a shared room where they would hang out and have coffee. Some people worked exclusively in the UNIX room, like Ken Thompson, but most worked in their private offices and came to the…
> Brian is super modest and claims to be a horrible programmer but he is comparing himself to Ken Thompson, who he thinks is just incredible. Ken once wrote a disassembler, assembler and B interpreter for a mini-computer that ran a printer they were struggling with, in a couple of days, so that they could get it printing again. This blew Brian's mind.
For the next level up here's Ken (in a very interesting conversation with Brian Kernighan about the history of Unix) describing McIlroy:
> McIlroy keeps coming up. He's the smartest of all of us and the least remembered (or written down)... McIlroy sat there and wrote ---on a piece of paper, now, not on a computer--- TMG [a proprietary yacc-like program] written in TMG... And then! He now has TMG written in TMG, he decided to give his piece of paper to his piece of paper and write down what came out (the code). Which he did. And then he came over to my editor and he typed in his code, assembled it, and (I won't say without error, but with so few errors you'd be astonished) he came up with a TMG compiler, on the PDP-7, written in TMG. And it's the most basic, bare, impressive self-compilation I've ever seen in my life.
This story, by the way, leads into how Ken created B (and how that was eventually improved by Dennis Ritchie into C).
Re: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, I'm sorry you didn't like the format. Thanks for giving it a listen anyhow.
I suppose this is just matter of personal preference, but I'm not a big fan of this style of podcast either - although I did greatly enjoy the episode! I just felt it would have been even better if it were simply a conversation, without jumping back and forth in time, inserting explanations (although they were helpful), etc. As you said in the podcast - "start at the beginning". If it had then proceeded from the begi…
That makes sense. Part of my process is having people listen through to the interview and let me know where they get confused. Then I add in explanations there. The explanations mean people don't get lost if they don't know what punch cards are or fortan for instance.
I also think there are many straight interview podcasts and I'm trying to do something different.