
An Interview with Brian Kernighan (2000) - trengrj
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mihaib/kernighan-interview/index.html?
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vorg
His view on advances in Computer Science in the future...

> we make a lot of progress, we are able to undertake bigger projects, we can
> build things which are much more interesting and sophisticated than what we
> could do 10 years ago. [...] But the amount of messy, intricate, awful code
> that doesn't work very well and that's underneath all of that has also
> increased enormously. In some sense I guess we'll continue to make progress,
> but it'll always be kind-of grimy and not-really-done yet. Because people
> always take on more than they can reasonably handle, they're always
> overreaching, and they seem never to go back and clean up the stuff that
> they did before.

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krat0sprakhar
> K: I don't use fancy debuggers, I use print statements and I don't use a
> debugger for anything more than getting a stack trace when the program dies
> unexpectedly.

Ha! Who would've thought that the author of so many books on software
engineering prefers using print statements for debugging. Great interview!

~~~
cremno
From “UNIX For Beginners” (2nd ed., 1979) written by him:

>The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with
judiciously placed print statements.

However the previous sentence is:

>The debugger adb is useful for digging through the dead bodies of C programs,
but is rather hard to learn to use effectively.

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versteegen
A month ago this (recent) video interview with Kernighan was posted here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10080956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10080956)

Notice that since then, the rest of that video interview has been posted:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFK6RG47bww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFK6RG47bww)

------
lordnacho
I wonder what he thinks of the fact that one of his bit twiddling algorithms
is standard fare at job interviews.

~~~
coldtea
Well, it's not like he hasn't created stuff that's standard fare at UNIX,
Linux, businesses, modern OSes, education, etc.

An algorithm being a standard fare at job interviews looks to be on the bottom
of such an accomplishment pile.

