Kernighan

I remember sitting at a speech Kernighan gave at Carnegie Mellon my junior year. He was funny and interesting which is a lot to say about a computer science person. Especially one as bright as he. A student at CMU recently interviewed him for a Romanian magazine and translated the interview to English and posted the link to slashdot.

If you’re into programming, I think you’d find the interview informative. Even if you don’t care about programming, I think it’s fascinating to hear what he has to say. When asked about teaching programming classes he comments on how schools should not be teaching things people can learn in trade schools and goes on to say, “That’s not what universities should be doing; universities should be teaching things which are likely to last, for a lifetime if you’re lucky, but at least 5 or 10 or 20 years, and that means principles and ideas. At the same time, they should be illustrating them with the best possible examples taken from current practice.”

Another interesting point is when the interviewer asks him what areas a student who’s interested in computers should enter, amongst other things, he says, “I think unfortunately the best advice you can give somebody is “do what you think is interesting, do something that you think is fun and worthwhile, because otherwise you won’t do it well anyway”. But that’s not any real help.”

As I said, it’s an interesting interview.