
How to succeed in language design without really trying [video] - ingve
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU
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temuze
Just in case anyone here doesn't know who Brian Kernighan is:

\- He co-created AWK (he's the K) and AMPL

\- He literally wrote the book on C with Dennis Ritchie (the book with the big
blue "C" on it)

\- He authored some of the first UNIX programs (cron, for example) when he was
working at Bell Labs

\- He made "Hello World!" a trope and named UNIX

He's also quite possibly the nicest person ever.

~~~
unwind
I love it how you mentioned "The C Programming Language"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language)),
the book commonly known as "K&R", without doing the K-reference and instead
doing that for AWK.

In my tiny little world, K&R is like a bazillion times more well-known than
AWK. Always fun with different perspectives. :)

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pldrnt
"Notation matters"

"If a language is useful, you will want to generate it by program"

well said

~~~
j-pb
And then he leaves the slide about lisp blank. Even though it's the prime
example of a language that one can generate by programs.

~~~
ericHosick
but only because he admitted he knew little about the subject matter...

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jaybosamiya
Biggest takeaways from the video (in my opinion):

\- "Notation matters"

\- "Start with domain specific languages [like regex/AMPL/etc], rather than
big general purpose ones - don't build the next C++"

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andrewchambers
It felt like he was biting his tongue and really pulling punches when
mentioning the complexity of C++.

I also liked the comment about some of the good ideas being lost over time. I
would love to hear an in depth talk about some of the serious the regressions
we have in modern software systems and design.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
I'm baffled and somewhat suspicious that awk became unpopular enough that I
didn't really understand it till now.

~~~
ferrari8608
Awk seems to have fallen out of favor, in my opinion, due to the rising
popularity of easier to use general purpose programming/scripting languages.
Awk is the bee's knees when it comes to processing text. You can do just about
anything to some text with it. However, you can do much the same with Perl or
Python, both of which can do more than just process text.

I still use awk for shell one-liners. It can do the work of grep, grep -v,
cut, and substring operations in one command, which makes things a bit simpler
(less processes, less pipes). Unfortunately, a grep piped to cut is almost
always faster due to awk being a very robust interpreter.

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sharvil
Couple of Computerphile videos featured Brian Kernighan [1], which I also
enjoyed. I particularly liked the Bell Labs one where he talked about what it
was like to work there, pretty fascinating stuff.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/Computerphile/search?query=Bria...](https://www.youtube.com/user/Computerphile/search?query=Brian+Kernighan)

