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 Clike 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 stillclassic book The C Programming Language. He, Bob Fourer and Dave Gay wrote AMPL, a domainspecific language for optimization problems.