V · Craft & community

Brian Kernighan

1942–

Princeton · ex-Bell Labs

Gave us

AWK (the K). The K&R book. "The Practice of Programming". "The Go Programming Language" (with Donovan).

The story

The clearest technical writer in the history of computing. Co-wrote books with Ritchie, Pike, Donovan, Plauger. Coined "Hello, World!" — sort of; the phrase predates him but K&R made it canonical.

More from Craft & community

Linus Torvalds Linux Foundation fellow · creator of Linux and Git Margaret Hamilton Hamilton Technologies · ex-MIT Instrumentation Lab Grace Hopper US Navy Rear Admiral · creator of the first compiler Barbara Liskov MIT · 2008 Turing laureate Dan Luu Independent · ex-MS · ex-Centaur · prolific essayist Joe Armstrong Ericsson · co-creator of Erlang Ada Lovelace Mathematician · the first programmer

Across the field

VI Eric Brewer UC Berkeley · ex-Google VP · CAP theorem VI Pat Helland Tandem · Microsoft · Amazon · Salesforce VI Werner Vogels CTO of Amazon · Dynamo paper VI Brendan Gregg Intel · ex-Netflix · ex-Joyent · performance engineer VI Adrian Cockcroft Sun · Netflix · AWS · serverless evangelist VII Solomon Hykes Co-founder of Docker · now Dagger · ex-dotCloud VII Joe Beda · Brendan Burns · Craig McLuckie Co-creators of Kubernetes at Google · Heptio · VMware · Microsoft VII Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) Independent · Redis Ltd. (until 2020) · now back to Redis

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