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Brian Kernighan

Professor of computer science & director of undergraduate studies, Princeton University

Co-authored The C Programming Language and helped develop influential programming tools, including awk.

Real Alpha has cut 7 moments of Brian Kernighan (Professor of computer science & director of undergraduate studies, Princeton University) talking, from an interview on The Peterman Pod published Oct 26, 2026.

What Brian Kernighan said

  1. The Peterman Pod ·

    Brian Kernighan: Inside Bell Labs, The Best Programmer, Why C Won

    7 moments · 29 min

    1. 16:33

      Bell Labs judged research over years, not weekly output

      “once a year, you had to write down on one side of one piece of paper what you had done.”
      at 16:55
    2. 54:06

      Princeton expects computer science majors to fall sharply

      “The class that will graduate two years later, it's probably going to be less than half that.”
      at 56:39
    3. 39:38

      C succeeded by balancing efficiency and expressiveness

      “I think it hit a sweet spot in some sense of efficiency and expressiveness.”
      at 39:59
    4. 27:55

      Ken Thompson built a Unix system in three weeks

      “Ken Thompson's the obvious one, I think. Certainly the best programmer I've ever met, unparalleled.”
      at 28:08
    5. 43:59

      Awk combined three researchers’ interests in a weekend build

      “we came up with a sort of language design and then peter went off one weekend to build it.”
      at 45:15
    6. 1:11:12

      AI-generated code still needs expertise to verify

      “90% of the time it generates a perfectly fine query and 10% of the time it doesn't, gives you a totally wrong answer, and I don't know which is which.”
      at 1:14:25
    7. 1:19:54

      C ran fastest in Kernighan’s language comparison

      “c was always the fastest but it was harder because you had to worry about memory management a bit”
      at 1:21:37

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