Brian Wilson Kernighan (pronounced Ker'-ni-han; the 'g' is silent; born 1942) is a computer scientist who worked at the Bell Labs and contributed to the design of the pioneering AWK and AMPL programming languages.

Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan has said that he had no part in the design of the C language: "It's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work". He authored many Unix programs, including ditroff.

Kernighan was also software editor for Prentice-Hall International. His Software Tools series spread the essence of 'C/Unix thinking' with makeovers for BASIC, FORTRAN, and Pascal - and most notably his 'Ratfor' (rational FORTRAN) was put in the public domain.

He has said that if stranded on an island with only one programming language, it would have to be C.

The "K" of K&R C and the "K" in the name AWK derive from "Kernighan."

He was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and received his Bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University, where since 2000 he has held a professorship in the department of computer science.

Writings

• Software Tools (1976 with P. J. Plauger)
• The C Programming Language ("K&R") (1978 with Dennis Ritchie)
• The Elements of Programming Style (1982 with P. J. Plauger)
• The Unix Programming Environment (1984 with Rob Pike)
• The AWK Programming Language (1988 with Al Aho and Peter J. Weinberger)
• The Practice of Programming (1999 with Rob Pike)
• ''AMPL: A Modeling Language for Mathematical Programming, 2nd Ed. (2003 with Robert Fourer and David Gay)

External links

• Brian Kernighan's home page at Princeton U.
• Brian Kernighan's home page at Bell Labs
• "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language" – By Brian Kernighan, AT&T Bell Labs, 2 April 1981
• An Interview with Brian Kernighan – By Mihai Budiu, for PC Report Romania, August 2000
• Interview with Brian Kernighan – By Aleksey Dolya, for Linux Journal, July 2003.

1942 births | Living people | Canadian computer scientists | Computer pioneers | Computer programmers | Technology writers | Torontonians | Unix people | Plan 9 people | Inferno people | Scientists at Bell Labs

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