Brian Kernighan
Brian Kernighan
Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The "K" of K&R C and the "K" in AWK both stand for "Kernighan". Since 2000 Brian Kernighan has been a Professor at the Computer Science Department of Princeton University, where he is also the Undergraduate Department Representative...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth1 January 1942
CountryCanada
Brian Kernighan quotes about
If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.
An effective way to test code is to exercise it at its natural boundaries
Don't document bad code - rewrite it.
Mechanical rules are never a substitute for clarity of thought.
C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.
90% of the functionality delivered now is better than 100% delivered never.
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
Do what you think is interesting, do something that you think is fun and worthwhile, because otherwise you won't do it well anyway.
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
Each new user of a new system uncovers a new class of bugs.
... it is a fundamental principle of testing that you must know in advance the answer each test case is supposed to produce. If you don't, you are not testing; you are experimenting.
Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.
Believe the terrain, not the map