Ernest McCarter

Brian Kernighan is a former Bell Labs member of technical staff, co-author of the original C book, and the one who popularized “Hello World.” We talked about what Bell Labs was like and the stories behind all the famous tools that were built there. In this episode: • Bell Labs culture and how he got hired • Day in the life at Bell Labs and the best engineer • Unix, C, and how awk got created • His favorite languages and advice for students Where to watch: • YouTube - youtube.com/watch?v=sMllOlxV… • Spotify - open.spotify.com/episode/2yb… • Apple Podcasts - podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… • Transcript - developing.dev/p/e072-brian-… Thank you to the sponsor of this episode for supporting my work: • WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at workos.com/ Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:42 What Bell Labs was and how he got hired 06:34 Why so many inventions came from Bell Labs 14:15 A day in the life at Bell Labs 27:55 The most impressive people he worked with 33:50 The AT&T film explaining Unix 39:46 Why C was so influential 43:25 How awk was created 48:40 What he misses most about Bell Labs 54:10 Are LLMs bad for computer science education 01:01:46 His 1972 commit in the Go repo 01:03:43 Grace Emlen, the fake Bell Labs employee 01:07:39 Why he writes so many books 01:19:58 His favorite and least favorite languages 01:24:28 Advice for students and young people 01:27:42 Outro