We, Programmers by Robert C. Martin

Author:Robert C. Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pearson Education
Published: 2025-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Brian Kernighan

Brian Wilson Kernighan was born in Toronto in 1942.

His father was a chemical engineer who ran his own small business making “a variety of poisonous substances for farmers.” Running that small business was “hard work,” and Kernighan was not tempted to take it over.

As a youth, Kernighan was intrigued by amateur radio. So, during his high school years, he built a small Morse code ham radio setup from “Heathkits of one sort or another.”

He was adept at building Heathkit electronics. Among his projects, in later days, were an audio system, a color TV, and an oscilloscope.17

17. I bet it was just like mine.

He was good enough at high school math that his math teacher suggested the Engineering Physics program at the University of Toronto. In typical self-deprecating style, he described that program as a “catch-all program for those who didn’t really know what they wanted to focus on.”

The first computer he saw was an IBM 7094 in 1963. He said it was in a big air-conditioned room populated by professional-looking people. “Ordinary people (and especially students) did not get anywhere near it.”

He tried to learn FORTRAN in school. He studied the FORTRAN II manual18 and understood the syntax, but he couldn’t figure out how to get started.

18. By Daniel D. McCracken, a name that echoes down the long hallways of my mind.

He took an internship at Imperial Oil (now Exxon) in 1963 and tried to write a COBOL program, but he couldn’t get it working.19 He described it as an “endless series of IF statements.”

19. I’d like to welcome him to the club. In 1970 I too wrote one big COBOL program that I never got working. I very nearly got fired from that job, but was rescued by one of the older hands who convinced my boss that I was better at assembler than COBOL.

In 1966 he spent a summer internship at MIT using the CTSS20 to build tools for Multics in MAD21 (Michigan Algorithm Decoder).

20. Compatible Time Sharing System.

21. If a MAD program had more than a critical number of compile errors, the compiler would print out a full-page ASCII image of Alfred E. Neumann. What? Me worry?

The next year, he landed an internship at Bell Labs and wrote “really tight” GE 635 assembly code to implement a list processing library for FORTRAN. It was this experience that finally hooked him on programming.

He was permanently hired at Bell Labs in 1969 and began working on several projects unrelated to Multics and Unix. But Thompson and Ritchie had offices nearby. So did Richard Hamming,22 who impressed upon Kernighan the importance of writing and the importance of style.

22. Yeah, THAT Hamming.

Hamming was fond of saying: “We give them a dictionary and grammar rules, and we say, ‘Kid, you’re now a great programmer.’” Hamming felt that there ought to be the notion of style in writing programs in the same manner as there is in writing prose.

It was from Hamming that Kernighan caught the writing bug and the style bug. This would become very important later on.

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