An inteview with Brian Kernighan, co-developer of AWK and AMPL

“In the ten years since you launched The Practice of
Programming, a separate book written with Rob Pike, has the way
programmers operate changed enough for you to consider amending any
parts of the publication?

“Programming today depends more and more on combining large
building blocks and less on detailed logic of little things, though
there’s certainly enough of that as well. A typical programmer
today spends a lot of time just trying to figure out what methods
to call from some giant package and probably needs some kind of IDE
like Eclipse or XCode to fill in the gaps. There are more languages
in regular use and programs are often distributed combinations of
multiple languages. All of these facts complicate life, though it’s
possible to build quite amazing systems quickly when everything
goes right. I think that the advice on detailed topics in The
Practice of Programming is sound and will always be — one has
to find the right algorithms and data structures, one has to test
and debug and worry about performance, and there are general issues
like good notation that will always make life much better. But it’s
not clear to me or to Rob that we have enough new good ideas for a
new book, at least at the moment.”

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