Oral History of Brian Kernighan

Before Unix and C became widely available, he coauthored “The Elements of Programming Style” to help improve programming generally. In the early 1970s, Fortran 66 was one of the few relatively portable languages, but its control structures were archaic, so he wrote the RATFOR preprocessor to add C-like control structures. Then he and Bill Plauger rewrote various Unix commands in RATFOR and wrote “Software Tools” so that a broader audience might get access, inspiring the Software Tools Users Group to adopt, port and promote them into other computing environments. Then, by 1978 he and Dennis Ritchie published the still-classic book “The C Programming Language.” He, Bob Fourer and Dave Gay wrote AMPL, a domain-specific language for optimization problems.