Of all the articles I have written in this “Library” section, this has been by far the most difficult to write of them all. It is extremely hard to summarize in a thousand words the major achievements of a person that has defined the way our modern world and our industry work, in the most unfathomable ways. Because, to be honest, it is hard to find a starting place when talking about those who have such long resumés as Mr. Kernighan. Let us try to find some starting points and see where this takes us. Let us pick one major milestone: this is the person who gave UNIX its name.…
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The Community
It would of course be easy to single out authors who have made important contributions to the world of Free, Libre and Open Source Software for this month's Library article. I'm sure we'll address their work in later issues. One of the most important reasons for the success of Free Software is its collaborative nature so this month we'll acknowledge the community effort to document open source software.
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Kathy Sierra
The history of programming language books can be roughly divided in three distinctive eras. The first one stretches from the beginnings of programming to the mid 1970s. Programming books from those times were an often underestimated byproduct of the marketing budget of big companies such as IBM, and inherited the dry approach of most engineering books in the post-war era.
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Adele Goldberg
These days, it's hard to appreciate that Object-Oriented Programming is so easy, it was taught to kids in junior high before it was ever taught to adults. As supposedly senior software engineers debate whether a Car truly "is a" Vehicle, and whether it wouldn't be easier to learn lambda calculus and determine the median monad blog post than to reflect the real objects in the real-world problem they're solving in their software, it seems reasonable to ask: is it really so difficult?
