Brian Kernighan, born January 1, 1942, worked very closely with Dennis Ritchie, developing the Unix family of operating systems at Bell Labs.
Kernighan credits Ritchie entirely for the development of the C programming language, but the two of them collaborated on The C Programming Language, the book that details the language in its original form. Kernighan is the âKâ in K&R, the common pseudonym for the two in relation to the language and the book.
He’s also the “K” in AWK, a domain-specific programming language he co-authored.
Kernighan is currently a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a professor at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D.
More on Kernighan:
Computer Hope
Princeton