Brian W. Kernighan

"Teaching Programmers:  Constants and Variables " 

Thursday, November 15, 4PM

Packard Lab Room 101  

(Refreshments will be served starting at 3:30p.m. in the lobby of
Packard Lab) 
    
   The rapid evolution of languages, tools, environments and expectations
presents major challenges and opportunities for programmers and for
software engineering education.  This is true across all kinds of
programming, but is especially so for Web systems, which are now
routinely written in untyped scripting languages and include Ajax,
mashups, toolkits, frameworks like Rails and Django, and a profusion of
interfaces, all operating asynchronously on distributed systems.
    For the past 7 or 8 years I have been teaching a course on advanced programming techniques that is more and more stretched between important old material (the constants) and new unproven material that might be important (the variables).  In this talk I will illustrate some of the challenges and discuss ways in which we might use complexity and rapid change to advantage.

Biography:   Dr. Kernighan made pervasive contributions to Unix and the Bell
Labs school of programming that it exemplified.  He is co-designer of the AWK and AMPL programing languages along with a variety of "little languages" tailored elegantly to specialized applications.  He co-authored "The C Programming Language" with C's inventor Dennis Ritchie.  He co-invented (with Shen Lin) two influential heuristics for graph partitioning and the traveling salesman problem. He has taught at Princeton since 2000 and works part-time for Google.  He's a member of the National Academy of Engineering.