Wednesday, October 14, 2009

An Interview With Brian Kernighan, Co-Developer of AWK and AMPL

Brian Kernighan—a contributor to the development of the AWK and AMPL programming languages—says that he remains "very interested" in domain-specific languages as well as tools that ease the writing of code. "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," he notes. "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." Kernighan points to an increase in scalable systems, and businesses that he thinks are making significant societal contributions include Google, through its wide scale access to a vast corpus of information. Kernighan observes that "for better or worse, the driving influence today [behind contemporary computing] seems to be to get something up and running and used via the Internet, as quickly as possible." However, he says that approach "only works because there is infrastructure: Open source software like Unix/Linux and GNU tools and Web libraries, dirt-cheap hardware, and essentially free communications."


http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/321082/an_inteview_brian_kernighan_co-developer_awk_ampl

The Web's Inventor Regrets One Small Thing

Governments around the world have put more of their data on the Web this year than previous years, and the United States and Britain have led the way, said Sir Tim Berners-Lee in an interview at a recent symposium on the future of technology in Washington, D.C. Berners-Lee, who is currently a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, is enthusiastic about having traffic, local weather, public safety, health, and other data in raw form online. People will create exciting applications once the data and online tools are available, he said. For example, a simple mash-up that combines roadway maps with bicycle accident reports could help bikers determine the most dangerous roads. "Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make," he said. "But the openness, transparency, and new uses of the data will make government run better, and that will make business run better as well." With regard to any regrets about the Web, Berners-Lee said that using the double slash "//" after the "http:" in Web addresses turned out to be unnecessary.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-regrets-one-small-thing/