Brian Kernighan

Brian Kernighan received his PhD from Princeton in 1969, and was in
the Computing Science Research center at Bell Labs until 2000. He is
now a professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton, where
he writes short programs and longer books. The latter are better than
the former, and certainly need less maintenance.

He is a co-creator of several programming languages, including AWK and
AMPL, and of a number of tools for document preparation. He is the
co-author of a dozen books and some technical papers, and holds 5
patents. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research areas include
programming languages, tools, and interfaces that make computers easier
to use, often for non-specialist users. He has also written two books
on technology for non-technical audiences: «Understanding the Digital
World» in 2017 and «Millions, Billions, Zillions: Defending Yourself in
a World of Too Many Numbers», published in 2018. His most recent book,
«Unix: A History and a Memoir», was published in October 2019.