Interview with Brian Kernighan of AWK/AMPL fame

oranghutan writes: In this interview, Brian Kernighan — who helped popularise C with his book (co-written with the creator Dennis Ritchie) The C Programming Language and contributed to the development of AWK and AMPL — talks about his tips for up and coming programmers, who he thinks are the icons of the programming world, and what his thoughts on Ruby, Perl and Java are.

He also discusses whether the classic book The Practice of Programming, co-written with Rob Pike needs an update. Plus he highlights Bill and Melinda Gates as two people doing great things through computer sciences for the world and says "a typical programmer today spends a lot of time just trying to figure out what methods to call from some giant package and probably needs some kind of IDE like Eclipse or XCode to fill in the gaps. There are more languages in regular use and programs are often distributed combinations of multiple languages. All of these facts complicate life, though it's possible to build quite amazing systems quickly when everything goes right."

Another good quote for programmers is: "Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia."

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/321082/an_inteview_brian_kernighan_co-developer_awk_ampl?cache=4