# Brian Kernighan

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/people/brian-kernighan/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

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.

- Role: Professor of computer science & director of undergraduate studies, Princeton University
- About: Co-authored The C Programming Language and helped develop influential programming tools, including awk.

## What Brian Kernighan said

- [Bell Labs judged research over years, not weekly output](https://realalpha.app/s/bell-labs-judged-research-over-years-not-weekly-output/)
  The Peterman Pod · Oct 26, 2026 · 4 min
  > “once a year, you had to write down on one side of one piece of paper what you had done.” — Brian Kernighan · [16:55](https://realalpha.app/v/sMllOlxVgD0/?t=1015)
- [Princeton expects computer science majors to fall sharply](https://realalpha.app/s/princeton-expects-computer-science-majors-to-fall-sharply/)
  The Peterman Pod · Oct 26, 2026 · 4 min
  > “The class that will graduate two years later, it's probably going to be less than half that.” — Brian Kernighan · [56:39](https://realalpha.app/v/sMllOlxVgD0/?t=3399)
- [C succeeded by balancing efficiency and expressiveness](https://realalpha.app/s/c-succeeded-by-balancing-efficiency-and-expressiveness/)
  The Peterman Pod · Oct 26, 2026 · 3 min
  > “I think it hit a sweet spot in some sense of efficiency and expressiveness.” — Brian Kernighan · [39:59](https://realalpha.app/v/sMllOlxVgD0/?t=2399)
- [Ken Thompson built a Unix system in three weeks](https://realalpha.app/s/ken-thompson-built-a-unix-system-in-three-weeks/)
  The Peterman Pod · Oct 26, 2026 · 6 min
  > “Ken Thompson's the obvious one, I think. Certainly the best programmer I've ever met, unparalleled.” — Brian Kernighan · [28:08](https://realalpha.app/v/sMllOlxVgD0/?t=1688)
- [Awk combined three researchers’ interests in a weekend build](https://realalpha.app/s/awk-combined-three-researchers-interests-in-a-weekend-build/)
  The Peterman Pod · Oct 26, 2026 · 4 min
  > “we came up with a sort of language design and then peter went off one weekend to build it.” — Brian Kernighan · [45:15](https://realalpha.app/v/sMllOlxVgD0/?t=2715)
- [AI-generated code still needs expertise to verify](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-generated-code-still-needs-expertise-to-verify/)
  The Peterman Pod · Oct 26, 2026 · 6 min
  > “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.” — Brian Kernighan · [1:14:25](https://realalpha.app/v/sMllOlxVgD0/?t=4465)
- [C ran fastest in Kernighan’s language comparison](https://realalpha.app/s/c-ran-fastest-in-kernighans-language-comparison/)
  The Peterman Pod · Oct 26, 2026 · 3 min
  > “c was always the fastest but it was harder because you had to worry about memory management a bit” — Brian Kernighan · [1:21:37](https://realalpha.app/v/sMllOlxVgD0/?t=4897)

## The episode

- [Brian Kernighan: Inside Bell Labs, The Best Programmer, Why C Won](https://realalpha.app/v/sMllOlxVgD0/) · The Peterman Pod · Oct 26, 2026