Interesting video on designing programming languages

Yesterday, I started watching this video on programming languages, and it took me over forty minutes to stop watching the video. It’s not because that the video was over an hour long, but rather the subject matter of the video.  It’s a presentation by Brian Kernighan titled “How to succeed in language design without really trying”.  The presentation by professor Kernighan was very well done.  He went through a bit of history with how some programming languages came about, as well as their usees.  He also talked about his time with Bell Labs, and how he, along with two other great programmers, wrote the language awk.  The video had me interested because, for one, I could understand half of what professor Kernighan said, and two, he admitted that he threw the language together out of necessity.  Also, he would, at times, remind the audience of his short comings, such as with functional programming languages, and remembering how to program in C.

Jason Anderson

Jason Anderson has been hacking up computers for nearly 20 years and has been using Linux for over 15 years. Among that, he has a BBA in Accounting. Look him up on Twitter at @FakeJasonA and on Mastodon on @ertain@mast.linuxgamecast.com

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