AWK is a domain-specific language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool. Like sed and grep, it is a filter, and is a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems.
Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist.
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist. He is best known for creating the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language. Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the "R" in K&R C, and commonly known by his username dmr.
troff, short for "typesetter roff", is the major component of a document processing system developed by Bell Labs for the Unix operating system. troff and the related nroff were both developed from the original roff.
Yacc is a computer program for the Unix operating system developed by Stephen C. Johnson. It is a lookahead left-to-right rightmost derivation (LALR) parser generator, generating a LALR parser based on a formal grammar, written in a notation similar to Backus–Naur form (BNF). Yacc is supplied as a standard utility on BSD and AT&T Unix. GNU-based Linux distributions include Bison, a forward-compatible Yacc replacement.
grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command g/re/p, which has the same effect. grep was originally developed for the Unix operating system, but later available for all Unix-like systems and some others such as OS-9.
James Gosling is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language.
Alfred Vaino Aho is a Canadian computer scientist best known for his work on programming languages, compilers, and related algorithms, and his textbooks on the art and science of computer programming.
The Unix philosophy, originated by Ken Thompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to minimalist, modular software development. It is based on the experience of leading developers of the Unix operating system. Early Unix developers were important in bringing the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering practice, spawning a "software tools" movement. Over time, the leading developers of Unix established a set of cultural norms for developing software; these norms became as important and influential as the technology of Unix itself, and have been termed the "Unix philosophy."
The C Programming Language is a computer programming book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally designed and implemented the C programming language, as well as co-designed the Unix operating system with which development of the language was closely intertwined. The book was central to the development and popularization of C and is still widely read and used today. Because the book was co-authored by the original language designer, and because the first edition of the book served for many years as the de facto standard for the language, the book was regarded by many to be the authoritative reference on C.
Peter Jay Weinberger is a computer scientist best known for his early work at Bell Labs. He now works at Google.
m4 is a general-purpose macro processor included in most Unix-like operating systems, and is a component of the POSIX standard.
Part of the troff suite of Unix document layout tools, eqn is a preprocessor that formats equations for printing. A similar program, neqn, accepted the same input as eqn, but produced output tuned to look better in nroff. The eqn program was created in 1974 by Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry. It was implemented using yacc compiler-compiler.
Jeffrey David Ullman is an American computer scientist and the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, at Stanford University. His textbooks on compilers, theory of computation, data structures, and databases are regarded as standards in their fields. He and his long-time collaborator Alfred Aho are the recipients of the 2020 Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science.
The Practice of Programming (ISBN 0-201-61586-X) by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike is a 1999 book about computer programming and software engineering, published by Addison-Wesley.
In computing, Pic is a domain-specific programming language by Brian Kernighan for specifying line diagrams. The language contains predefined basic linear objects: line, move, arrow, and spline, the planar objects box, circle, ellipse, arc, and definable composite elements. Objects are placed with respect to other objects or absolute coordinates. A liberal interpretation of the input invokes default parameters when objects are incompletely specified. An interpreter translates this description into concrete drawing commands in a variety of possible output formats. Pic is a procedural programming language, with variable assignment, macros, conditionals, and looping. The language is an example of a little language originally intended for the comfort of non-programmers in the Unix environment.
Unix is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.
The Software Tools Users Group (STUG) was a technical organization started in 1976, in parallel with Usenix. The STUG goal was to develop a powerful and portable Unix-like system that could be implemented on top of virtually any operating system, providing the capabilities and features of Unix in a non-proprietary system. With its focus on building clean, portable, reusable code shared amongst multiple applications and runnable on any operating system, the Software Tools movement reestablished the tradition of open source and the concepts of empowering users to define, develop, control, and freely distribute their computing environment.
