[HN Gopher] Brian Kernighan's Home Page
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Brian Kernighan's Home Page
Author : mehdix
Score : 118 points
Date : 2022-01-07 11:27 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cs.princeton.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cs.princeton.edu)
| jjice wrote:
| Incredible man, just like his coworkers as Bell. All of that Bell
| Labs team is fantastic. Obvious Ritchie and Thompson are top dogs
| in our minds, but McIlroy and Cherry, and the rest of the gang
| that I don't know the name of are part of such an incredible part
| of CS history.
|
| Kernighan is an excellent writer and in every interview I've ever
| seen, he's the most humble man you could imagine. Him and Ritchie
| taught me C, and to that I am appreciative.
| birriel wrote:
| I appreciate that many CS heavyweights have such plain webpages.
| Stallman and Larry Wall are some other examples.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Way too wide paragraphs to be read comfortably on a standard
| Full HD monitor. I.e. form over function in order to achieve
| that vaunted "pragmatic and old school" aesthetic.
|
| EDIT: On second thought though it seems that people are reading
| too much into it and just projecting this "branding" onto their
| hero (see my other comment in this thread). Ironically yes:
| they probably _are_ too busy to craft their homepages in such a
| way that people on HN will be impressed by their couldn't-care-
| less attitude!
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Doesn't HN give you paragraphs just as wide?
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Shoot... :-)
| bluedino wrote:
| > Way too wide paragraphs to be read comfortably on a
| standard Full HD monitor.
|
| That's the users fault.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| The Unix Way. I love it.
| bluedino wrote:
| Most web pages aren't designed to be viewed on a full-
| width browser window for the exact reason you said.
| kps wrote:
| Point of order: Resizable windows are the Xerox PARC way.
| Veen wrote:
| You know that you can change a browser window's size? The
| alternative is a thin strip of text with enormous margins,
| which I find about as annoying as overly long lines. Written
| pages aren't really mean to be displayed in very wide
| windows.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I didn't know that you can resize windows.
|
| Seriously though I have Firefox' Reader Mode for subpar
| websites.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I like the plainness in general, but on contemporary monitors,
| this means that lines of text are very long, causing eye
| fatigue pretty quickly.
|
| Typography is an art way more ancient than computers and I feel
| that it should be taken into account even on webpages;
| famously, Donald Knuth studied typography pretty deeply when
| designing TeX.
| Thrymr wrote:
| This is from the old school of thought on the web, the HTML
| is only about content and semantics, and all the typography
| should be left to the browser (and user preferences). If the
| default font in your browser causes fatigue for _you_ , you
| can change the defaults. This is hardly possible with most
| websites now without intrusive browser extensions.
| timeon wrote:
| Just double click on Safari's title bar and the window will
| automatically adjust it's width.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Works on any screen, desk, mobile. Works in Lynx from the
| command line.
|
| Just narrow your window, maybe by changing the width of your
| sidebar.
| chrisfinazzo wrote:
| Not surprising, really.
|
| At their core, many of these people rose to prominence in an
| earlier era, before the web even existed. Most of their
| personal pages reflect this. The people Brian worked with at
| Bell Labs really were (first and foremost) programmers and
| probably either wrote their personal pages with simple HTML or
| used a tool to generate it from some other language. As a
| result it's usually not very pretty.
|
| Stroustrup is a slight exception, as his page at Morgan Stanley
| is quite "corporate-looking"[1], but his personal site is very
| much in the same vein as the others.
|
| When you think of the Old Guard of the web, it's usually names
| like Zeldman, Meyer, Marcotte, et al that have anything which
| resembles the web as we know it today.
|
| [1]: https://www.morganstanley.com/profiles/bjarne-stroustrup-
| man...
| dnfehren wrote:
| Eh, this looks like most academic personal pages, heavy or
| lightweight. Some promo of their books, minimal content and
| links to papers or presentations that are at least 2 years
| behind the current year (whatever the current year is).
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Some of it is probably generational. Kernighan will be 80 this
| year. Ritchie, gone now 10 years, was a little older.
|
| Wall and Stallman are a generation younger -- true Boomers, if
| you will, born in the 50s.
|
| The computing topics tackled by those generations were
| foundational, but they also predate the web as a Thing. So
| they're ON the web, to one degree or another, but it's not
| their focus.
|
| By the time you get to the next gen of folks -- and let's just
| use GenX as the label; I mean folks born in the early 60s
| through about 1980 -- the people making contributions have the
| web as a MAJOR component of the computing landscape. These
| folks are "web native," and so it makes sense that they'd have
| fancier web pages/sites because the tools and technologies for
| doing such things are part of their remit, or at least close to
| it. Twiddling with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was a big deal for
| a long time, and it showed in the pages of folks like (say)
| Eric Meyer.
|
| I'm 51, born in 1970. I don't think I ever saw a web presence
| for anyone more than about 5 years older than I am that was
| elaborate, or the sadly-now-withdrawn-from-public-life Mark
| Pilgrim.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It seems to almost be a "brand." Many tech heavyweights have
| these raw HTML pages.
|
| It says "I'm so busy doing stuff that makes a difference, that
| I won't dedicate time to eye-candy. You know who I am. I don't
| need to tell you that."
|
| I can't really argue with that.
| El_RIDO wrote:
| I always assumed it was down to them creating their homepages
| early on (as in: the mid-to-late 90s) and having gotten used
| to editing the raw HTML file using vi/emacs/ed/whatever when
| they needed to update it. And they never had a reason to
| change that workflow.
|
| My oldest, still active, website was created in that style
| around 20 years ago and only in recent years did I change to
| a git and ansible based deployment instead of just editing
| the raw files on the server over ssh.
| sklargh wrote:
| It's the equivalent of senior law firm partners leaving
| simple typos in their emails to junior staff.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| You're seeing (and falling for) an ego-trip that is not
| there. All CS professors have webpages like this one.
| ludami wrote:
| This is 100% the case. I wouldn't be surprised if
| universities actually have a policy against not customizing
| profile pages. Otherwise you're opening things up to the
| good old Geocities age.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Sigh... was the personal attack really necessary?
|
| I see these pages, all the time, with tech heavyweights
| that aren't teachers. I won't bother tracking them down,
| but I've been seeing them for years.
|
| I don't think it's an ego-trip. These folks really are that
| busy, and this stuff just isn't important. Some, however, I
| am sure, have ego trips. I don't really care. I'm not
| inviting them over for dinner, and they probably wouldn't
| come, if I did.
|
| The ego trip is more with sites like mine, where I take the
| time to polish it up. It's more important to me, than it is
| to them.
|
| Some of them actually have fairly current-looking pages,
| because they work[ed] for companies (or schools) that have
| templates[0].
|
| Also, he isn't my "hero." I mean, seriously...
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150312003109/http://resea
| rch.g...
| jcfrei wrote:
| I think the reason is that the original intention behind HTML
| was to be a quickly written markup language to present and
| share research. With minimal styling like text size,
| paragraphs, some bold or italics for emphasis and images.
| Anything going beyond that is for commercial rather than
| academic purposes.
| foobarian wrote:
| To add to that, markup was intended to be semantic, not for
| layout, and the expectation was the browser would do the
| right thing to present it to the user. I think you are
| right that they are in that early mindset before browser
| decided to become pixel perfect typesetting engines. Why
| should I tell you how wide a <paragraph> should be?!?
| Browser knows best if it's on a small monitor, big monitor,
| phone, etc. Sigh.
| [deleted]
| mehdix wrote:
| I think even if he had time, he wouldn't change that page
| much. _simplicity_ is his philosophy. A page that you can
| edit with the most basic tools and publish in terminal is
| totally aligned with that. The page does its job, anything
| else is unnecessary clutter.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I mean you can't argue with it. If you want a page like
| this, you only need to know HTML, FTP, a text editor.
|
| Meanwhile my attempted personal website, 'simply' github
| pages, also requires you to know about Hugo, which requires
| a ruby runtime locally; markdown, css, js, Git, Github,
| Github's two-factor authentication, etc.
|
| I mean it won't win any design awards but basic html for
| infrequently updated websites is absolutely fine.
| oefrha wrote:
| Unstyled or almost unstyled HTML home page is basically
| standard practice among (especially older) academics, CS or
| not. Don Knuth's home page with custom colors is almost
| elaborately designed by academic standards.
| rightbyte wrote:
| My uni faculty had those until like 2015. They were awesome and
| everything was instant. Easy access old exams or querky fun
| programs etc.
|
| Later the uni forced their crappy content management system on
| everyone and it was a login required bloated JS mess instead.
|
| And the faculty staff never bothered to write bios or
| interesting stuff there.
| amosj wrote:
| > MY NAME IS BEING USED IN A PHISHING ATTACK. > DO NOT RESPOND TO
| MAIL OFFERING MONEY FOR UNDERGRAD RESEARCH ASSISTANTS.
|
| I wonder if that's been effective. I suppose the targets are
| students at Princeton so once repeated enough, on his web page
| and elsewhere, it'll make using his name less profitable.
| pzo wrote:
| considering how many people commenting on HN didn't notice it
| and commenting on something different I don't think it will be
| much effective - this headline is quite hard to notice for
| people who are banner blind.
| blantonl wrote:
| For those that don't know who Brian Kernighan is: basically, he's
| one of the founders of the UNIX operating system with Bell
| Laboratories, and a significant early contributor to the C
| programming language: among other amazing accomplishments that
| literally all of us touch in one way shape or form today.
| chrisfinazzo wrote:
| At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the students
| _only_ know him as Prof. Kernighan. CS majors are certainly
| nerds, but most of the stuff that made Brian famous happened
| well before they were born.
|
| Quite a second act, if you think about it.
| alophawen wrote:
| Don't forget plan9 and golang
| cogburnd02 wrote:
| > significant early contributor to the C programming language
|
| source? http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?I=info.Brian_Kernighan
| says that
|
| > Kernighan has said that he had no part in the design of the C
| language: "It's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work".
|
| He did help write the first device-independent troff (The
| original by Joe Ossanna only worked with one specific type of
| computer-controlled typesetter.) and helped write the K&R C
| book, and the K in AWK is him, too.
| noarchy wrote:
| Helping to write K&R C would make him a "significant early
| contributor to the C programming language" to many people
| here.
| nope96 wrote:
| I was reading "The C Programming Language" as a teenager,
| probably around 1994. I had a question, so I looked up Brian
| Kernighan's email* and wrote him. Ten minutes later I had a well
| written answer that explained my issue. It didn't seem like a big
| deal to teenage me, but now - wow, that was the magic of the
| early internet.
|
| * There is a small chance I am remembering this wrong, and I'd
| written Dennis Ritchie instead. I know I wrote to either K or R
| :)
| mindcrime wrote:
| Similar thing here, but the email was to P.J. Plauger. At the
| time he was the editor of C/C++ User's Journal and I had a
| question about something I read there, and shot him an email.
| Didn't really expect anything of it, but I got a helpful reply.
| psyc wrote:
| Someone once advised me that I should do this when so moved.
| Since then I have emailed various luminaries, and I don't think
| I've yet failed to get a helpful response. Anything from a URL,
| to a sentence, to 2 paragraphs.
| throway453sde wrote:
| Did not knew Brian Kernighan has authored so many books. This is
| useful.
| thomasahle wrote:
| This follows the classical Prof. Dr. Style of academic websites:
| http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/
|
| Unfortunately many of the examples in the article have since been
| replaced by boring template website from the university or
| institute.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| I still prefer this "raw" HTML style and use it to provide
| information about my own courses instead of the stupid and
| dysfunctional "learning management system" (Blackboard) that
| our university wants us to use.
|
| It's much faster to add information to the handwritten web page
| than to use the Javascript GUI mess and this also makes it much
| easier for students to discover information.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Kernighans Books are the gold-standard I measure all
| instructional textbooks against.
| jstx1 wrote:
| In addition to the books, he's the 'k' in the awk programming
| language and he came up with the name Unix.
| patrec wrote:
| Dunno. IMO, the only good thing that can be said about _The C
| Programing Language_ is that it 's short. _The AWK Programming
| Language_ , on the other hand, is indeed a classic.
| derekp7 wrote:
| The shortness is what makes it great. I recall going through
| a couple of thick C books, not getting anywhere. Until I
| picked up the K&R book, and was writing usable C within a
| couple weeks.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| The PhishBowl page it links to is great!
| https://informationsecurity.princeton.edu/phish-bowl
| xiaq wrote:
| I knew that he was one of the coauthors of the Go book, but
| surprised to learn that he's written more books after that! What
| a career.
| cmollis wrote:
| I was at Princeton once (maybe 15 or 20 years ago) for a meeting
| with one of the startups that spun out of one of their graduate
| programs.. The guys asked to meet me at the CS building (which
| was pretty cool to actually be in because I could have never
| gotten into Princeton as an undergrad!). Anyway, I'm walking down
| the hall and I see a door that says 'Brian Kernighan'.. I turned
| and asked them if that was 'THE Brian Kernighan'? they chuckled
| and said 'yeah..that's him'. I couldn't believe it.. I wish I had
| met him.. but it was pretty cool to see the guy just walking
| around.. talking in his office, etc. This guy had a huge part in
| inventing something that runs most of the networked world.. and
| there he was.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| This reminds me of the time when I was contractor at IBM
| Research. Right around the corner from my office there was an
| office with a tag "Benoit Mandelbrot" and a few doors further
| down there was the name of one of the Gang of Four. Never saw
| either of them unfortunately :-(
| ubermonkey wrote:
| For someone like Kernighan, the end of the inscription on
| Christopher Wren's resting place -- ie, St Paul's, in London --
| is entirely appropriate:
|
| SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE
|
| "If you seek his monument, look around you."
| jacobsimon wrote:
| I was a lowly CS undergrad at Princeton, never even took
| Kernighan's class but spoke with him a few times in passing. On
| graduation day, my father was standing around in the back and
| struck up a conversation with him, oblivious that this was the
| legend of the department. Yet even so, they had a great
| conversation and Kernighan even slipped in some nice things to
| say about me. So on top of everything, he's also an
| extraordinarily kind and humble man.
| mehdix wrote:
| That's something I really miss. Having studied and worked in a
| developing country, I learned too late about these giants and
| it took me years to grasp the philosophy behind their great
| works and literally _unlearn_ and _relearn_ things. It is IMO a
| privilege to be exposed to great minds early in your education
| and carreer.
| marstall wrote:
| Nice! just put "Unix: A History and a Memoir" in my Amazon cart.
| jjice wrote:
| Fantastic book. It's a genre that's lacking, but this is in my
| top 2 CS history books (up there with The Dream Machine, but
| that's a lot of hardware as well).
| marstall wrote:
| looking forward to it then. I always appreciate the prose of
| the K&R C book, which was the first programming book I ever
| read.
| HFguy wrote:
| Try a "Soul of a New Machine" which is similar but focused on
| hardware.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Great video of Brian Kernighan & friends at Bell Labs explaining
| the UNIX system:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2022-01-07 23:01 UTC)