Location
Event Description
How to Succeed in Language Design Without Really Trying presented by Professor Brian Kernighan
ABSTRACT: Why do some languages succeed while others fall by the wayside? I've helped create nearly a dozen languages (mostly small) 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 other languages, 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.
BIO: Brian Kernighan received a PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton in 1969. He joined the Computer Science department at Princeton in 2000, after many years at Bell Labs. He is a co-creator of several programming languages, including AWK and AMPL, and of a number of tools for document preparation. He is the co-author of a dozen books and some technical papers, and holds 5 patents.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research areas include programming languages, tools and interfaces that make computers easier to use, often for non-specialist users. He has also written two books on technology for
non-technical audiences: Understanding the Digital World in 2017 and Millions, Billions, Zillions: Defending Yourself in a World of Too Many Numbers, published in 2018. His most recent book, Unix: A History and a Memoir, was published in October 2019.
