41–50 of 88 posts
Thanks 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…
For 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
Heard great things about it and really want to read it. However, a warning to anyone thinking of getting this book on kindle: It's unreadable. It literally will not download on a kindle device. Just purchased it recently but will have to refund.
Thanks 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…
It looks like my professor was just taking after the people he worked with. For that level of programmer, writing new drivers for hardware was a weekend project.
One of our CompSci textbooks was written by that same professor -- I just took it down off the shelf and looked at the intro. Brian K. was thanked for being an early reader of "several revisions."
In retrospect, it's really cool to have been only a couple degrees away from that kind of history -- and I probably didn't quite realize how awesome that was back then.
Thanks 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…
I loved this episode when I first heard it, but reading your recap of it reminds me of a similar story from my college days. I had a CompSci professor who had worked at Bell Labs, which was all of 10 minutes down the street from the college. I remember he was having problems with printing something in the computer lab one week, so he wrote a driver for the printer over the weekend. This would have been about 1997 or…
"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
Thanks 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…
I loved this episode when I first heard it, but reading your recap of it reminds me of a similar story from my college days. I had a CompSci professor who had worked at Bell Labs, which was all of 10 minutes down the street from the college. I remember he was having problems with printing something in the computer lab one week, so he wrote a driver for the printer over the weekend. This would have been about 1997 or…
Thanks 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 conversati…
For 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"?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38212134-how-the-interne...
The 'Internet History Podcast' that was made while writing the book is also excellent.
The Friendly Orange Glow (2017) by Brian Dear is also very good. He's also on HN.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34373814-the-friendly-or...
Accidental Empires (1996) by Robert X Cringely is also pretty good:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27652.Accidental_Empires...
I read the K&R's C Programming book when I was in undergrad. It's different from other programming books I read from APress, O'Reilly publications. Hard to digest but never before read a book so short and crisp that fully explains the programming language. To any noob programmer out there, I'd say pick K&R's book, spend a semester on it, do the exercises. You will become better engineer. You'll not regret.
I came at this the other way. KnR was my first real book about programming. Next were Bentley. Most O'Reilly and like books are overly wordy and don't get to the meat of the issue for me. I don't think KnR will make you a much better engineer. But it will give you a really strong boost into being a reasonable c programmer. And it does that well because it focuses on that.
At that time I was writing verbose loops in class assignments to write similar functions. Looking their code made a strong positive impact. Their codes are poetic.
And the way they unfold topics in the book is so good. Structures and pointers often confusing many people I knew were natural in their book.
An example: In that first class (COS 333) with ~150 students, I was surprised when he knew my name — and then I found out that he didn't know just my name but the names of all of his students. It takes a special kind of professor who takes the time to do that every semester.