Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QQ7k5sn2-o

by zdw • 2 years ago

414 110 2 years ago

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

I'm only one third of the way through the video, but could see that the podcasters are asking some good insightful questions.

Thanks for sharing, OP.

carterdmorgan23• 2 years ago

I just found out we cracked the Top 20 on Hacker News! Crazy! I’m Carter, one of the podcasters from the video. I’m glad you’re enjoying it! It was such a huge honor to talk to Brian Kernighan.

jjice• 2 years ago

I hadn't heard of this podcast until just now, but an entire show dedicated to software book sounds like a dream come true! I'm going to download a few of these for the train. I love that you guys are diving into such a niche!

mettamage• 2 years ago

How did you get him on your podcast? That's amazing!

dinkumthinkum• 2 years ago

I found your podcast a few days ago on a different book. Keep it up, I think you have a good niche and doing something you rarely see, which are deep dives on programming books. The only other one I really know of is Connor Hoekstra has a couple nice playlists on SICP and something else but this is a little different, good job.

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

gotcha, and agreed.

bwk is one of my software heroes, along with dmr, bs, lw, gvr, etc.

JetSetIlly• 2 years ago

I love the Practice of Programming. Of all the books on programming that I've read, the lessons of that book are the ones that remain strongest in my mind. I've not read it in many years but I feel it influences my practice everyday.

carterdmorgan23• 2 years ago

It was the first time I’ve ever read it and I was surprised how much of it still held true given it’s 25 years old. Some of the specific programming examples are pretty outdated, but the general ideas are as solid as ever!

bigdict2• 2 years ago

Curious what examples you felt were outdated.

zombiwoof• 2 years ago

I wish interviewing now was more about knowing the concepts in that book versus leetcode

Brian Kernighan prob couldn’t pass a leetcode hard interview in this ridiculous new world

carterdmorgan23• 2 years ago

My last interview cycle I interviewed with some big names (Stripe, Square, Shopify, etc.) and was pleased that none of them asked any LeetCode style questions. All pretty practical programming stuff. Stripe had an interview where they had forked the Jackson Java library, introduced a bug, and then asked me to find and fix it. Pretty unique style, but much more applicable to the actual job of programming.

goosejuice• 2 years ago

That's a clever interview question, but wouldn't that suffer from diffing origin/main? Or was this a in person / on screen interview with no git history?

HumblyTossed• 2 years ago

Stripe had an interview where they had forked the Jackson Java library, introduced a bug, and then asked me to find and fix it.

I think I would actually enjoy an interview like that.

senderista3• 2 years ago

In my most recent interviews with Apple and Amazon there were no LeetCode questions after the phone screen. Quite a change from previous experience.

kps• 2 years ago

Reminiscent of Peter Higgs (Nobel Prize winner for the eponymous boson) saying that he would not be able to get an academic job today, not to mention Katalin Karikó (Nobel Prize winner for mRNA) being demoted by UPenn for not attracting grant money.

opello4• 2 years ago

A nice value in this format (since it discusses books) would be to have a comment or portion of the description dedicated to listing the books (or ideally the media) discussed to a list.

I added "The Bit Player" (Claude Shannon documentary from 2018) to my watch list as well as "Recoding America," "Chip War," and "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage" to my reading list.

carterdmorgan23• 2 years ago

What do you mean by this exactly? Like a list of all upcoming books we’ll discuss? If you’re curious, you can find that on our website at www.bookoverflow.io!

farleykr• 2 years ago

I think they mean that the description of the episode should have a list of books (and maybe other resources) that were mentioned in the episode itself.

opello4• 2 years ago

Sorry, I didn't mean upcoming books, just the media discussed in the episode. Like the ones I mentioned adding to my watch/reading lists. It would have made finding them a little easier is all and could serve as value to the description since it's certainly the case that they were discussed in the video! :)

256_2• 2 years ago

I read the Elements of Programming Style and the Practice of Programming around the same time and they became completely mixed up in my mind. I'll often remember something from one of those books but be completely unable to remember which one it was from.

Both good books, and both were co-authored by Kernighan. I think they complement each other well.

carterdmorgan23• 2 years ago

We might have to add Elements of Programming Style to our backlog.

256_2• 2 years ago

Well if you're interested, the Elements of Programming Style, to me, was interesting for two reasons. It presents plenty of timeless insights about programming, but it's also very interesting as a historical document; it argues against old-fashioned GOTO-based programming in favour of structured programming, and for-loops executing 0 times, for example.

It has a list of rules of thumb at the end, which contains my favourite part of the book. Pretty much all of them are timeless, but right in the middle is "Avoid the FORTRAN arithmetic if."

The one big thing I disagree with it on is the weird idea that you should never have 2 IFs in a row.

richrichie• 2 years ago

There is a talk he gave at IAS on this. Pretty good one. I think it is available on You Tube.

commandersaki• 2 years ago

Love Kernighan, such a humble person. In one of the videos that he was featured on in youtube, he spoke about how he was solving a difficult problem in his thesis which turned out to be NP-complete before the theory had been fleshed out. Emailed him for his thesis and got a pretty quick response, was a really interesting read.

carterdmorgan23• 2 years ago

It's a rare combination to find someone both as intelligent and humble as he is. Truly a blessing to our industry.

kaba0• 2 years ago

I believe you are right as intelligent grows, but the very top end usually has people excelling in many things and personality as well. At least that’s what I noticed.

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

see the publications section here for more of his books:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan

dgb23• 2 years ago

Love Kernighan, such a humble person.

A perfect example: Just about 3-4mins into the interview he said that the motivation behind the book was "kind of pretentious".

To me, and many others, his opinions on programming are amongst the most interesting and useful. In large parts because he can convey them so clearly.

xyzzy_plugh• 2 years ago

The "g" is silent, folks.

You should try to get Rob Pike on. He'd probably make it a point to correct your pronunciation. I can hear him now...

carterdmorgan23• 2 years ago

Yeah, someone on YouTube pointed out the same thing. D'oh. I wish Brian would have corrected us!

We'd love to get Rob Pike on too! Currently working on it, although he's a little harder to get a hold of.

nmz• 2 years ago

You should ask the arraycast guys on how they did it. They got him to talk about ivy and apl/array style programming for an hour or so.

rramadass13• 2 years ago

This book is foundational; all Programmers (especially beginners) should read it. Like all Kernighan's books, the language is simple, concise and precise focusing on the foundations/essentials with no fluff and all in a little over 200 pages. Understand the principles from the examples shown here and then apply them in your own context. The beauty of K&P's books is that they do not overwhelm you with theory but show you the craft/practical applications of it after which a study of the theory becomes more accessible.

To give a concrete example; i had some experience in network programming/protocol implementations before i came across this book. In the "Notations" chapter, they show network message pack/unpack routines written in the style of printf/scanf functions with format strings specifying the packet layout! This was a eye-opening lesson for me in the use of proper notations and little languages. There is also some code snippet examples showing ideas behind Virtual Machines, Code Threading, JIT compilation etc.

Folks should also get Kernighan and Pike's older book "The Unix Programming Environment" to go with this. The chapter "Program Development" gives a complete example of developing a compiler for a small calculator language using compiler development tools (and no theory!) in around 50 pages. This is the smallest and simplest exposition that i know of on how to write a compiler.

In summary; get all of Kernighan's books and study them! :-)

carterdmorgan23• 2 years ago

Thanks for the heads up on "The Unix Programming Environment!" I've been searching for a book with a concise explanation on how to write a compiler, and you can't go wrong with one from Kernighan!

mehdix• 2 years ago

Can only second you. His style is by far my most favorite among all other technical authors. And thanks for the reminder, time to get another one of his books.

rramadass13• 2 years ago

His style is by far my most favorite among all other technical authors.

All authors should learn from Kernighan's books (co-authored with Plaugher/Ritchie/Pike) on how to write technical books. 90% of all the computer programming books published nowadays are too verbose (why the hell are they so huge?), meandering over inessentials, lack of clarity in language, a paucity of clear and precise examples and overall just a waste of paper. Reading them is more of a chore then enlightening whereas all of Kernighan's books are only a little over 200 pages, dense with knowledge and a pleasure to read.

kaycebasques2• 2 years ago

Just ordered the true Gang of Four:

* The C Programming Language

* The UNIX Programming Environment

* The Practice of Programming

* The Elements of Programming Style

I've read the C book before and also remember the writing to be excellent. I'm sure I'll pick up lots of programming wisdom but I'm also approaching this as a technical writer, figuring out what exactly makes Kernighan's books so good. I have a hunch that Kernighan has studied writing a lot, or has at least done a lot of "first principles thinking" about writing. The title "The Elements of Programming Style" for example is a reference to one of the most famous books about writing style, "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White (which everyone should read once; it literally fits easily into your back pocket).

carterdmorgan23• 2 years ago

One of the great things about The Practice of Programming is how much it references other non-coding works. You can tell Kernighan draws his knowledge from many sources, not just technical ones.

dehrmann2• 2 years ago

No idea what your background is, but since you just bought four books, make sure you're spending more time reading and writing code than reading books. Some people fall into the theory trap and don't spend enough time making use of that theory.

rramadass13• 2 years ago

To your first three above, add Marc Rochkind's Advanced Unix Programming and Richard Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment and you have got yourself a complete course in C/Unix programming which is the bedrock for everything else; C is the "lingua franca" and Unix (via its variants) the "standard" OS.

Tip: Many of these old books can be had for cheap as used copies on Amazon/Betterworldbooks etc.

mvdtnz• 2 years ago

In fact if you disregard the contents and preface, the very first words in The Elements of Programming Style are a quote from The Elements of Style,

"It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules."

William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style

amy-petrik-214• 2 years ago

If we're going all in on the unix lore here, I'd suggest kernnighghan's book "Unix: A Memoir" as an optional add-on. Lots of good lore and history as to "how and why" things work in such a such way. Some commands in there you may not use or maybe heard of but not fully understand, such as grep, why the word grep, why the other types of grep such as egrep. And on the topic of grep, clearly a very popular command early on, so you also get a sense of "what were seen as the core commands commonly used initially" (and whether those may be useful to you today)

munificent• 2 years ago

This is the smallest and simplest exposition that i know of on how to write a compiler.

I haven't read Kernighan and Pike's book but another really small compiler exposition I like is Wirth's PL/0 in "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs". A little outdated at this point, but still a very pleasant read.

rramadass13• 2 years ago

Thanks for the pointer, will take a look at it. I don't believe these things become "outdated" unless you are a bleeding edge practitioner. For most of us "ordinary" Programmers what is needed is breadth over depth and a general idea of what the subject is about so that we are not entirely clueless. Depth will always come when we actually get to work on a project which needs that specific expertise.

coolbreezetft24• 2 years ago

As someone who has been programming professionally for 10 years - what would I gain from reading this book? Not to sound snarky but genuinely wondering what makes it a 'must read' for people who are comfortably coasting in their careers

blandblender• 2 years ago

If you're at Goog or Meta, you probably have seen best practices around you. If you're working at elsewhere, some things in the book would might be new to you.

rramadass13• 2 years ago

Not being rude but 10 years of experience is dependent on what that experience actually entailed. IIRC Steve McConnell in his book "Code Complete" says "You can have 20 years of experience or 1 year's experience repeated 20 times". The inference should be clear.

I have been programming since the early 90's and can assure you there is more knowledge in these sort of books from certain authors than most of the books being published today.

The book brings together a lot of aspects to Programming some of which may seem obvious but still have nuances to think about. It also teaches you advanced ways to think about your design (eg. the "Notations" chapter i mention in another comment) where you make your code simpler and elegant by inventing simple DSLs/VMs for parts of your problem. It is this "holistic" view of programming that i think is so essential to understand.

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

Another author and his books in the same category of excellence as Kernighan and his books, is Jon Bentley and his books Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley_(computer_scient...

carterdmorgan23• 2 years ago

Added to the backlog! As our audience grows, we've debated doing live backlog grooming on YouTube so that listeners have a chance to chime in and voice their opinions on what we should read.

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

I think that's a good idea.

rramadass13• 2 years ago

Also his earlier slim Writing Efficient Programs book. What this teaches you is how to think about efficiency from the top down with an emphasis on Algorithm and Language and hence useful to all programmers. Pair it with modern books on efficiency which deal mainly with compiler-level/OS-level/Processor-level performance techniques by Agner Fog, Fedor Pikus etc. and you get a complete picture.

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

Also his earlier slim Writing Efficient Programs book.

Yes, that's a really good one. I own a copy of it, bought years ago, and have read it pretty much cover to cover. Have also applied the guidelines in it, some.

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

the war stories briefly mentioned in the footnotes of the book, are very interesting too.

for example, one of them is about a team that speeded up the run time of a quicksort implementation on a supercomputer by a factor of a thousand times (yes, times, IIRC, not percent), by doing successive optimisations at many layers of the stack, from high level algorithms and data structures, down to the hardware.

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

with an emphasis on Algorithm and Language

did you mean algorithms and data structures?

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan

that link mentions many more of his achievements.

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

I suggest you add Software Tools in Pascal to your list of books to podcast about. Also by Kernighan.

I own a copy of that book and think it is good.

AnimalMuppet• 2 years ago

You might get more than you bargained for on that topic.

Kernighan and Plaugher had written "Software Tools" in RATFOR. Then they wrote "Software Tools in Pascal". And then, in direct response to the experience of writing that, Kernighan wrote a paper titled "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language". (Because writing in Pascal should have been way easier than writing in RATFOR, and it wasn't, and Kernighan gave some thought to why it wasn't.)

It's still an interesting read. You can find it online, for example at https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas...

Note well: This refers to the original standard version of the language. Extensions like Turbo Pascal fixed many of the problems. (Except that, as he said, there was no portability between the extensions. Even that kind of was fixed by Turbo Pascal becoming the "standard" extensions.)

rramadass13• 2 years ago

Just to add to the above; RATFOR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfor) was implemented as a preprocessor to Fortran with its control structures almost identical to those of C. So going from the freedom of C syntax to the straitjacket of Pascal might have been too much and hence the Pascal paper.

Here is the pdf of Brian Kernighan's paper on RATFOR - http://www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger/research/repro/ratfor.pdf

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

Thanks for your comment.

You might get more than you bargained for on that topic

However, I did know about the points in your comment, mostly. [1]

That's because I happened to have read about the Tools book being first written in RATFOR (which, IIRC, stood for RATional FORtran) and then in Pascal, many years ago. I was a heavy Turbo Pascal user first, before becoming a heavy C and Unix user. And I used to keep reading the news about these subjects I was interested in. That's how I know about that topic.

[1] I said "mostly" above, because I somehow, wrongly, remembered that paper as having been written by Rob Pike, instead of by Brian Kernighan.

pjmorris• 2 years ago

Finding 'Software Tools in Pascal' in my local mall bookstore, before I even had access to a computer running Pascal, turned out to be a kind of cheat code for my career. I marveled at the ideas and the writing and it set me up to acquire much of the the rest of the Kernighan canon.

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

Kernighan is also a co-author of The Go Programming Language book, at least of the 1st edition.

voidUpdate3• 2 years ago

Is that why Go forces K&R brackets instead of letting you choose?

bxparks• 2 years ago

Maybe you already know this and your comment was in jest, but the real reason is that the Go lexer automatically inserts semicolons (https://go.dev/doc/effective_go#semicolons) using heuristic rules which forces the opening brace to be on the same line.

fuzztester20• 2 years ago

Kernighan was a co-author of the Go book, but I don't know how much he was involved with the actual design of the language. Maybe not much, or at all, although, of course, he is a key part of the original Unix mafia (my term, not pejorative, rather meant admiringly, because I cut my programming teeth on UNIX and C software and books, and worked on that platform a lot, earlier), many of whom are still going strong in their 70s and 80s. So the Go bracket style may not be attributable to him.

Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]

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