A Princeton professor, finding a little time for himself in the summer academic lull, emailed an old friend a couple months ago.
I wish I understood git better, but in spite of your help, I still don't have a proper understanding, so this may take a while.".
Kernighan is the "K" in AWK, a special-purpose language for extracting and manipulating language that was key to Unix's pipeline features and interoperability between systems.
A working awk function (AWK is the language, awk the command to invoke it) is critical to both Standard UNIX Specification and IEEE POSIX certification for interoperability.
Kernighan had been teaching C to workers at Bell Labs and convinced its creator, Ritchie, to collaborate on a book to spread the knowledge.
He spoke with Ars Technica's Richard Jensen for a 50th anniversary history of Unix.
Kernighan, now 80, offhandedly mentions in the interview that he has also patched something "quick and dirty" to let AWK handle CSV files. »