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URLhttps://thenewstack.io/unix-co-creator-brian-kernighan-on-rust-distros-and-nixos/
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First Indexed2025-08-31 16:15:03 (7 months ago)
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Meta TitleUnix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS - The New Stack
Meta DescriptionKernighan shared his thoughts on what he thinks of the world today — with its push away from C to more memory-safe programming languages, its hundreds of distributions of Linux — and with descendants of Unix powering nearly every cellphone.
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“I’m still teaching at Princeton,” 83-year-old Brian Kernighan recently told an audience at the InfoAge Science and History Museums in Wall, New Jersey. “I have not yet retired!” A geek legend for his contributions to Unix at Bell Labs — and for co-authoring, in 1978, the definitive guide for the C programming language — Kernighan was invited to speak at the “ Vintage Computer East” festival . And last month the videos were uploaded to YouTube, showing that his talk ended with a unique question-and-answer session that turned almost historic… Besides a fun, fond look at the glory days of OS innovation, Kernighan shared his thoughts on what he thinks of the world today — with its push away from C to more memory-safe programming languages, its hundreds of distributions of Linux — and with descendants of Unix powering nearly every cellphone. “I’m going to make this as informal as I can,” Kernighan promised his audience, answering their questions for nearly half an hour. And besides being informative and insightful, it was clear that Kernighan — and his audience — were having a lot of fun… Rust Replacing C? It was a moment for the ages. “Do you think there’s any sort of merit to Rust replacing C?” one audience member asked, a frequent topic on TNS . “Or is this just a huge hype bubble that’s waiting to die down?” TRENDING STORIES In a world that’s been earnestly transitioning for years to more memory-safe languages, the answer from a long-time booster of C — for over half a century — promised to be nothing short of iconic. “Ohhh, Rust,” Kernigham said, to audience laughter. ‘”I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt,” he said. “And I found it a — pain… I just couldn’t grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn’t even an issue!” Yet his biggest complaint about Rust seemed to be its performance — an especially damning complaint from a man whose early career started on a 16-bit PDP 11/20. Speaking of Rust, Kernighan said “The support mechanism that went with it — this notion of crates and barrels and things like that — was just incomprehensibly big and slow.” “And the compiler was slow, the code that came out was slow…” All in all, Kernighan had had a bad experience. “When I tried to figure out what was going on, the language had changed since the last time somebody had posted a description! And so it took days to write a program which in other languages would take maybe five minutes…” It was his one and only experience with the language, so Kernighan acknowledged that when it comes to Rust “I’m probably unduly cynical. “But I’m — I don’t think it’s gonna replace C right away, anyway.” What’s a Distro? Kernighan was also asked one question that really put him on the spot. “What’s your favorite distro?” As the audience laughed, Kernighan smiled knowingly, and then feigned naivete about this new world with more than one distribution of a Unix-like operating system. (“ What’s that word?!”) But then he said honestly that while he uses a Mac, it’s only to open a bunch of terminal windows “to whatever Linux system the computer science department is running at any given moment. And I don’t even know what it is. So, uh — sorry! I can’t be more helpful than that.” But another question seemed deeply steeped in the lore of forgotten programming languages. “Given your pioneering role with C, are you familiar with the derivative Holy C ?” It’s an exotic variant of C written by the late Terry A. Davis for his homegrown bible-themed operating system TempleOS. HolyC (mixing source code with x86_64 assembly code) can still compile into x86_64 assembly code. As the audience laughed, Kernighan smiled and said “the short answer is no.” But “the slightly more extended answer is: Does this show up on web sites like 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall ?” (The long-running site shows how the song’s lyrics would be printed in 1500 different programming languages — but alas, HolyC is not one of them.) And when another questioner asked Kernighan for his thoughts on the package manager Nix and the NixOS distribution, a pattern became clear. “God, it’s another one I’ve never heard of,” Kernighan said with a laugh. He clarified later that “I think I’ve heard it, but I don’t know anything about it, so I can’t give you an answer.”) Yesterday and Today During his talk Kernighan remembered the overall environment at Bell Labs fondly, calling it cooperative, collegial, and fun… “It was great fun to hang out with these people.” But he also remembered that after Microsoft Windows came along, the whole world of technology changed, and “a lot of effort, focus, and talented people started to work in the PC world…” Kernighan remembered that “the good ideas and the talented people sort of drifted away, to some extent — or even a lot — from Unix.” And there was “much more of a focus on interaction,” because Microsoft was making consumer products (not meant for “a technical population), Though he also reminded the audience that the world then saw the development of Linux, which “keeps this legacy of Unix alive.” So how does he feel about the consumerization of Unix today? That was another question asked, with Mac/iPhone/iPhone users using its descendants without even knowing it — and “deviating so far from the original free, open source philosophy.” “I think you hit the nail on the head,” Kernighan replied, “when you said that most people don’t know it…” He noted that iPhones are running a “fairly long-path-of-evolution version of Unix,” while Android phones “are running a different flavor there of Linux underneath all of that…. I think from my side, as just — you know, somebody who was involved loosely in the early days — and has a phone — I find it intriguing. “And I also find it kind of irritating that underneath there is a system that I could do things with — but I can’t get at it!” And his audience laughed and applauded again… One questioner even pointed out that Kernighan “has effectively been involved in software for the life of software as a commercial thing.” But that also means he’s also lived to see it become commercialized and “productized”. So “do you have any hot takes on the current state of software as it exists today…? Kernighan smiled slyly — as his audience laughed again — as the questioner added, “10 words or less, if you can!” “A lot of it sucks…!” he said, to audience applause.  “Unfortunately, it’s all too true.” And then he added, to his questioner, that “I could elaborate. But maybe offline…” Kernighan vs. Vibe Coding During his presentation, Kernighan had said one legacy of Unix was “programs that write programs”. “A compiler creates assembly language…? That’s a program writing a program… And once you get it right, programs that write programs do a good job. They do it often better than people do.” But then, hearing his words out loud, he quickly added a caveat. “I will pass over what’s happening with large language models…” As the audience laughed, he continued, “Because my few attempts on that have kind of invalidated what I just said!” As the talk drew to a close, someone asked for his advice for future generations of programmers. It’s a question he’s been answered before, and his first response was to acknowledge that “the answer to that — the real answer — is ‘I don’t know.'” But of course, he had more to say. And there was something affirming in this Unix pioneer’s thoughtful answer. “I think probably computers in useful forms, where you could be doing things with them, will be with us for a very, very long time.” “It may be that most people will not really realize the extent to which what they do is controlled by software that runs on hardware that uses a communication system. But you , if you do this stuff, will know that. And I think that will give you something to do that will be interesting — and probably actually employable , for some time in the future.” He had one more thing to say. Though it’s become a cliche, Kernighan told his audience that “if this stuff turns you on, do it. Okay…? I think you can do that kind of stuff, and you can have a good time, and you can probably make a living and enjoy what you’re doing… “I think doing stuff that you find intriguing is the way to go.” YOUTUBE.COM/THENEWSTACK Tech moves fast, don't miss an episode. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to stream all our podcasts, interviews, demos, and more. Group Created with Sketch.
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Here's what engineering needs to know.](https://thenewstack.io/securing-ai-agent-systems/) Apr 15th 2026 8:00am, by [Michelle Gill](https://thenewstack.io/author/michelle-gill/ "Posts by Michelle Gill") [When AI writes 100K lines of code, QA becomes the whole job](https://thenewstack.io/ai-code-qa-bottleneck/) Apr 15th 2026 7:00am, by [John Biggs](https://thenewstack.io/author/john-biggs/ "Posts by John Biggs") [MCP is everywhere, but don't panic. Here's why your existing APIs still matter.](https://thenewstack.io/api-mcp-agent-integration/) Mar 23rd 2026 5:00am, by [Camille Crowell-Lee](https://thenewstack.io/author/camille-crowell-lee/ "Posts by Camille Crowell-Lee") and [Morgan Fine](https://thenewstack.io/author/morgan-fine/ "Posts by Morgan Fine") [Before you let AI agents loose, you’d better know what they’re capable of](https://thenewstack.io/risk-mitigation-agentic-ai/) Mar 12th 2026 1:22pm, by [Charles Humble](https://thenewstack.io/author/charles-humble/ "Posts by Charles Humble") [GSMA Open Gateway offers developers one API for 300+ mobile networks](https://thenewstack.io/gsma-open-gateway-developers/) Mar 4th 2026 10:26am, by [Adrian Bridgwater](https://thenewstack.io/author/adrian-bridgwater/ "Posts by Adrian Bridgwater") [Your AI strategy is built on layers of API sediment](https://thenewstack.io/ai-strategy-api-sediment/) Feb 17th 2026 9:37am, by [Charles Humble](https://thenewstack.io/author/charles-humble/ "Posts by Charles Humble") [Solving the Problems That Accompany API Sprawl With AI](https://thenewstack.io/solving-the-problems-that-accompany-api-sprawl-with-ai/) Jan 15th 2026 1:00pm, by [Heather Joslyn](https://thenewstack.io/author/hjoslyn/ "Posts by Heather Joslyn") [Expo bets big on React Native’s agentic future](https://thenewstack.io/expo-bets-big-on-react-natives-agentic-future/) Apr 16th 2026 11:37am, by [Paul Sawers](https://thenewstack.io/author/paul-sawers/ "Posts by Paul Sawers") [From clobbered drafts to real-time sync](https://thenewstack.io/real-time-sync-engine/) Apr 14th 2026 10:00am, by [David Moore](https://thenewstack.io/author/david-moore/ "Posts by David Moore") [Moving beyond the “magic scaling sauce” myth](https://thenewstack.io/beyond-magic-scaling-myth/) Apr 2nd 2026 9:30am, by [TNS Staff](https://thenewstack.io/author/tns-staff/ "Posts by TNS Staff") [Backend Development in 2026: What's Changed, What Matters, and What to Learn Next](https://thenewstack.io/introduction-to-backend-development/) Mar 19th 2026 11:37am, by [TNS Staff](https://thenewstack.io/author/tns-staff/ "Posts by TNS Staff") [How To Get DNS Right: A Guide to Common Failure Modes](https://thenewstack.io/how-to-get-dns-right-a-guide-to-common-failure-modes/) Dec 24th 2025 8:00am, by [Sheldon Pereira](https://thenewstack.io/author/sheldon-pereira/ "Posts by Sheldon Pereira") and [Denton Chikura](https://thenewstack.io/author/denton-chikura/ "Posts by Denton Chikura") [What engineering leaders get wrong about data stack consolidation](https://thenewstack.io/data-stack-consolidation-risks/) Apr 15th 2026 12:00pm, by [Anil Inamdar](https://thenewstack.io/author/anil-inamdar/ "Posts by Anil Inamdar") [Kumo's new foundation model replaces months of data science engineering with plain-English queries](https://thenewstack.io/kumo-ai-foundation-models/) Apr 14th 2026 12:01pm, by [Adrian Bridgwater](https://thenewstack.io/author/adrian-bridgwater/ "Posts by Adrian Bridgwater") [Amazon S3 Files gives the world's biggest object store a file system](https://thenewstack.io/aws-s3-files-filesystem/) Apr 7th 2026 3:00pm, by [Frederic Lardinois](https://thenewstack.io/author/frederic-lardinois/ "Posts by Frederic Lardinois") [Moving beyond the “magic scaling sauce” myth](https://thenewstack.io/beyond-magic-scaling-myth/) Apr 2nd 2026 9:30am, by [TNS Staff](https://thenewstack.io/author/tns-staff/ "Posts by TNS Staff") [Build it yourself: A data pipeline that trains a real model](https://thenewstack.io/data-pipelines-serve-ai/) Mar 28th 2026 9:00am, by [Jessica Wachtel](https://thenewstack.io/author/jessica-wachtel/ "Posts by Jessica Wachtel") [Expo bets big on React Native’s agentic future](https://thenewstack.io/expo-bets-big-on-react-natives-agentic-future/) Apr 16th 2026 11:37am, by [Paul Sawers](https://thenewstack.io/author/paul-sawers/ "Posts by Paul Sawers") [Digital Experience Monitoring belongs in the modern developer workflow](https://thenewstack.io/digital-experience-monitoring-workflow/) Apr 3rd 2026 10:00am, by [Kayla Bondy](https://thenewstack.io/author/kayla-bondy/ "Posts by Kayla Bondy") [WebMCP turns any Chrome web page into an MCP server for AI agents](https://thenewstack.io/webmcp-chrome-ai-agents/) Mar 17th 2026 11:50am, by [David Eastman](https://thenewstack.io/author/david-eastman/ "Posts by David Eastman") [Confluent adds A2A support, anomaly detection, and Queues for Kafka in major platform update](https://thenewstack.io/confluent-kafka-a2a-agents/) Mar 3rd 2026 10:21am, by [Jelani Harper](https://thenewstack.io/author/jelani-harper/ "Posts by Jelani Harper") [Google's Chrome browser moves to a two-week release cycle](https://thenewstack.io/chrome-two-week-releases/) Mar 3rd 2026 9:00am, by [Frederic Lardinois](https://thenewstack.io/author/frederic-lardinois/ "Posts by Frederic Lardinois") [Claude Opus 4.7 arrives with better vision, memory, and instruction-following](https://thenewstack.io/claude-opus-47-launch/) Apr 16th 2026 1:56pm, by [Meredith Shubel](https://thenewstack.io/author/mshubel/ "Posts by Meredith Shubel") [Anthropic lays down identity verification on Claude](https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-claude-identity-verification/) Apr 16th 2026 9:21am, by [Adrian Bridgwater](https://thenewstack.io/author/adrian-bridgwater/ "Posts by Adrian Bridgwater") [How to build an AI-powered private document search app with RAG, ChromaDB, and memory](https://thenewstack.io/build-rag-document-search/) Apr 10th 2026 12:00pm, by [Teri Eyenike](https://thenewstack.io/author/teri-eyenike/ "Posts by Teri Eyenike") [Open-source leaders question whether Meta's Alexandr Wang will truly give away its AI models](https://thenewstack.io/meta-open-source-models/) Apr 7th 2026 4:40pm, by [Adrian Bridgwater](https://thenewstack.io/author/adrian-bridgwater/ "Posts by Adrian Bridgwater") [Anthropic's harness shakeup "just fragments workflows," developers warn](https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-claude-harness-restrictions/) Apr 6th 2026 5:39pm, by [Adrian Bridgwater](https://thenewstack.io/author/adrian-bridgwater/ "Posts by Adrian Bridgwater") [Anthropic lays down identity verification on Claude](https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-claude-identity-verification/) Apr 16th 2026 9:21am, by [Adrian Bridgwater](https://thenewstack.io/author/adrian-bridgwater/ "Posts by Adrian Bridgwater") [Cal.com goes private: A security reckoning for open source](https://thenewstack.io/cal-com-codebase-security-ai/) Apr 15th 2026 10:25am, by [Paul Sawers](https://thenewstack.io/author/paul-sawers/ "Posts by Paul Sawers") [Agents are rewriting the rules of security. Here's what engineering needs to know.](https://thenewstack.io/securing-ai-agent-systems/) Apr 15th 2026 8:00am, by [Michelle Gill](https://thenewstack.io/author/michelle-gill/ "Posts by Michelle Gill") [Claude Mythos Preview completes full cyberattack simulation for the first time](https://thenewstack.io/claude-mythos-preview-simulation/) Apr 14th 2026 2:35pm, by [Meredith Shubel](https://thenewstack.io/author/mshubel/ "Posts by Meredith Shubel") [The TeamPCP attacks are a warning: Your CI/CD pipeline is the new front line](https://thenewstack.io/cicd-pipeline-front-line/) Apr 2nd 2026 12:00pm, by [Dan Lorenc](https://thenewstack.io/author/dan-lorenc/ "Posts by Dan Lorenc") [Who will maintain the web when PHP's veterans retire?](https://thenewstack.io/php-web-skills-hiring-age/) Apr 16th 2026 2:53pm, by [Darryl K. Taft](https://thenewstack.io/author/darryl-taft/ "Posts by Darryl K. Taft") [Dogfooding and platforms: Spotify’s agentic-first development](https://thenewstack.io/dogfooding-and-platforms-spotifys-agentic-first-development/) Apr 16th 2026 12:55pm, by [Jennifer Riggins](https://thenewstack.io/author/jennifer-riggins/ "Posts by Jennifer Riggins") [Expo bets big on React Native’s agentic future](https://thenewstack.io/expo-bets-big-on-react-natives-agentic-future/) Apr 16th 2026 11:37am, by [Paul Sawers](https://thenewstack.io/author/paul-sawers/ "Posts by Paul Sawers") [Is your internal platform ready to keep up with AI-accelerated development?](https://thenewstack.io/is-your-internal-platform-ready-to-keep-up-with-ai-accelerated-development/) Apr 16th 2026 6:07am, by [TNS Staff](https://thenewstack.io/author/tns-staff/ "Posts by TNS Staff") [Google Gemini Mac app debuts to end the clunky hunt for browser tabs](https://thenewstack.io/gemini-app-macos-launch/) Apr 15th 2026 4:13pm, by [Adrian Bridgwater](https://thenewstack.io/author/adrian-bridgwater/ "Posts by Adrian Bridgwater") [Edge-forward: Akamai eyes sweet spot between centralized & decentralized AI inference](https://thenewstack.io/akamai-edge-ai-inference/) Apr 1st 2026 7:00am, by [Adrian Bridgwater](https://thenewstack.io/author/adrian-bridgwater/ "Posts by Adrian Bridgwater") [WebAssembly is now outperforming containers at the edge](https://thenewstack.io/webassembly-component-model-future/) Mar 29th 2026 9:00am, by [B. Cameron Gain](https://thenewstack.io/author/bruce-gain/ "Posts by B. Cameron Gain") [WebAssembly could solve AI agents' most dangerous security gap](https://thenewstack.io/webassembly-sandboxing-ai-agents/) Mar 24th 2026 9:01am, by [B. Cameron Gain](https://thenewstack.io/author/bruce-gain/ "Posts by B. Cameron Gain") [How WebAssembly plugins simplify Kubernetes extensibility](https://thenewstack.io/how-webassembly-plugins-simplify-kubernetes-extensibility/) Mar 3rd 2026 2:00pm, by [B. Cameron Gain](https://thenewstack.io/author/bruce-gain/ "Posts by B. Cameron Gain") [WebAssembly is everywhere. Here's how it works](https://thenewstack.io/webassembly-is-everywhere-heres-how-it-works/) Feb 25th 2026 11:00am, by [Jessica Wachtel](https://thenewstack.io/author/jessica-wachtel/ "Posts by Jessica Wachtel") [AI Operations](https://thenewstack.io/ai-operations/) [CI/CD](https://thenewstack.io/ci-cd/) [Cloud Services](https://thenewstack.io/cloud-services/) [DevOps](https://thenewstack.io/devops/) [Kubernetes](https://thenewstack.io/kubernetes/) [Observability](https://thenewstack.io/observability/) [Operations](https://thenewstack.io/operations/) [Platform Engineering](https://thenewstack.io/platform-engineering/) [When AI writes 100K lines of code, QA becomes the whole job](https://thenewstack.io/ai-code-qa-bottleneck/) Apr 15th 2026 7:00am, by John Biggs [Why observability platforms are becoming AI auditing tools](https://thenewstack.io/agentic-ai-observability-auditing/) Apr 14th 2026 6:55pm, by Jennifer Riggins [Why data governance is the secret to AI agent success](https://thenewstack.io/data-governance-ai-agents/) Apr 10th 2026 11:00am, by Rod Cope [Ramp targets AI’s fastest-growing cost: spend that’s hard to track](https://thenewstack.io/ramp-ai-token-spend-management/) Apr 9th 2026 9:00am, by Paul Sawers [Microsoft wants to make service mesh invisible](https://thenewstack.io/microsoft-wants-to-make-service-mesh-invisible/) Apr 8th 2026 1:11pm, by Frederic Lardinois [Is your internal platform ready to keep up with AI-accelerated development?](https://thenewstack.io/is-your-internal-platform-ready-to-keep-up-with-ai-accelerated-development/) Apr 16th 2026 6:07am, by TNS Staff [Claude Code can now do your job overnight](https://thenewstack.io/claude-code-can-now-do-your-job-overnight/) Apr 14th 2026 2:56pm, by Frederic Lardinois [The TeamPCP attacks are a warning: Your CI/CD pipeline is the new front line](https://thenewstack.io/cicd-pipeline-front-line/) Apr 2nd 2026 12:00pm, by Dan Lorenc [Why coding agents will break your CI/CD pipeline (and how to fix it)](https://thenewstack.io/coding-agents-cicd-fix/) Apr 2nd 2026 11:00am, by Arjun Iyer [How TeamPCP turned Aqua Security's own Trivy scanner into a weapon against millions of developers](https://thenewstack.io/teampcp-trivy-supply-chain-attack/) Mar 27th 2026 10:00am, by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols [Postgres to Iceberg in 13 minutes: How Supermetal compares to Flink, Kafka Connect, and Spark](https://thenewstack.io/postgres-iceberg-cdc-benchmarks/) Apr 15th 2026 11:00am, by Yaroslav Tkachenko [Why "good enough" cloud databases are becoming a business risk](https://thenewstack.io/cloud-database-complacency-research/) Apr 15th 2026 9:00am, by Cynthia Dunlop [Amazon S3 Files gives the world's biggest object store a file system](https://thenewstack.io/aws-s3-files-filesystem/) Apr 7th 2026 3:00pm, by Frederic Lardinois [SUSE Rancher and Vultr want to break AI infrastructure free from the hyperscalers](https://thenewstack.io/vultr-suse-rancher-ai/) Apr 4th 2026 9:00am, by B. Cameron Gain [Vultr says its Nvidia-powered AI infrastructure costs 50% to 90% less than hyperscalers](https://thenewstack.io/vultr-nvidia-ai-infrastructure/) Apr 3rd 2026 3:08pm, by B. Cameron Gain [Is your internal platform ready to keep up with AI-accelerated development?](https://thenewstack.io/is-your-internal-platform-ready-to-keep-up-with-ai-accelerated-development/) Apr 16th 2026 6:07am, by TNS Staff [Why data governance is the secret to AI agent success](https://thenewstack.io/data-governance-ai-agents/) Apr 10th 2026 11:00am, by Rod Cope [Is observability still an operations problem at your organization?](https://thenewstack.io/is-observability-still-an-operations-problem-at-your-organization/) Apr 6th 2026 12:05pm, by TNS Staff [The TeamPCP attacks are a warning: Your CI/CD pipeline is the new front line](https://thenewstack.io/cicd-pipeline-front-line/) Apr 2nd 2026 12:00pm, by Dan Lorenc [There’s a hidden tax on every AI-generated merge request](https://thenewstack.io/hidden-tax-ai-code/) Apr 2nd 2026 10:00am, by Brian Wald [Can you make Kubernetes invisible? Here's why AWS is on a mission to do it.](https://thenewstack.io/aws-kubernetes-invisible-simplicity/) Apr 14th 2026 1:52pm, by Adrian Bridgwater [Amazon EKS Auto Mode wants to end Kubernetes toil — one node at a time](https://thenewstack.io/eks-auto-mode-kubernetes/) Apr 7th 2026 1:55pm, by Adrian Bridgwater [True enterprise sovereignty is more approachable than ever, thanks to K8s-powered cloud-neutral PostgreSQL](https://thenewstack.io/sovereign-postgresql-kubernetes-portability/) Apr 7th 2026 11:31am, by TNS Staff [How platform teams are eliminating a \$43,800 "hidden tax" on Kubernetes infrastructure](https://thenewstack.io/virtual-clusters-kubernetes-cost-isolation/) Mar 28th 2026 4:09pm, by Janakiram MSV [Your Kubernetes isn't ready for AI workloads, and drift is the reason](https://thenewstack.io/ai-workloads-kubernetes-infrastructure-drift/) Mar 25th 2026 8:43am, by TNS Staff [Why observability platforms are becoming AI auditing tools](https://thenewstack.io/agentic-ai-observability-auditing/) Apr 14th 2026 6:55pm, by Jennifer Riggins [Is observability still an operations problem at your organization?](https://thenewstack.io/is-observability-still-an-operations-problem-at-your-organization/) Apr 6th 2026 12:05pm, by TNS Staff [Digital Experience Monitoring belongs in the modern developer workflow](https://thenewstack.io/digital-experience-monitoring-workflow/) Apr 3rd 2026 10:00am, by Kayla Bondy [Solo.io launches agentevals to solve agentic AI's "biggest unsolved problem"](https://thenewstack.io/soloio-agentevals-evaluates-ai-agents/) Mar 28th 2026 6:00am, by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols [From pillars to platform: How open observability data is changing the industry](https://thenewstack.io/open-observability-ai-platforms/) Mar 20th 2026 6:00am, by Ted Young [Dogfooding and platforms: Spotify’s agentic-first development](https://thenewstack.io/dogfooding-and-platforms-spotifys-agentic-first-development/) Apr 16th 2026 12:55pm, by Jennifer Riggins [Anthropic lays down identity verification on Claude](https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-claude-identity-verification/) Apr 16th 2026 9:21am, by Adrian Bridgwater [A year in, Google wants its Axion processors to feel like a scheduling decision](https://thenewstack.io/google-axion-kubernetes-arm/) Apr 15th 2026 6:41pm, by Frederic Lardinois [Spring creator wants Java's type system to tame agentic AI](https://thenewstack.io/spring-creator-java-type-system-agentic-ai-rod-johnson/) Apr 14th 2026 2:49pm, by Darryl K. Taft [HPA-managed workloads: Why the obvious waste stays](https://thenewstack.io/hpa-managed-workloads-why-waste-stays/) Apr 11th 2026 9:51pm, by Yasmin Rajabi [Dogfooding and platforms: Spotify’s agentic-first development](https://thenewstack.io/dogfooding-and-platforms-spotifys-agentic-first-development/) Apr 16th 2026 12:55pm, by Jennifer Riggins [Is your internal platform ready to keep up with AI-accelerated development?](https://thenewstack.io/is-your-internal-platform-ready-to-keep-up-with-ai-accelerated-development/) Apr 16th 2026 6:07am, by TNS Staff [What engineering leaders get wrong about data stack consolidation](https://thenewstack.io/data-stack-consolidation-risks/) Apr 15th 2026 12:00pm, by Anil Inamdar [Amazon EKS Auto Mode wants to end Kubernetes toil — one node at a time](https://thenewstack.io/eks-auto-mode-kubernetes/) Apr 7th 2026 1:55pm, by Adrian Bridgwater [Is observability still an operations problem at your organization?](https://thenewstack.io/is-observability-still-an-operations-problem-at-your-organization/) Apr 6th 2026 12:05pm, by TNS Staff [C++](https://thenewstack.io/c/) [Developer tools](https://thenewstack.io/developer-tools/) [Go](https://thenewstack.io/go/) [Java](https://thenewstack.io/java/) [JavaScript](https://thenewstack.io/javascript/) [Programming Languages](https://thenewstack.io/programming-languages/) [Python](https://thenewstack.io/python/) [Rust](https://thenewstack.io/rust/) [TypeScript](https://thenewstack.io/typescript/) [Open source USearch library jumpstarts ScyllaDB vector search](https://thenewstack.io/open-source-usearch-library-jumpstarts-scylladb-vector-search/) Feb 5th 2026 12:00pm, by Jelani Harper [AWS WAF vs. Google Cloud Armor: A Multicloud Security Showdown](https://thenewstack.io/aws-waf-vs-google-cloud-armor-a-multicloud-security-showdown/) Nov 25th 2025 10:00am, by Advait Patel [Goodbye Dashboards: Agents Deliver Answers, Not Just Reports](https://thenewstack.io/goodbye-dashboards-agents-deliver-answers-not-just-reports/) Nov 23rd 2025 9:00am, by Ketan Karkhanis [Rust vs. C++: a Modern Take on Performance and Safety](https://thenewstack.io/rust-vs-c-a-modern-take-on-performance-and-safety/) Oct 22nd 2025 2:00pm, by Zziwa Raymond Ian [Building a Real-Time System Monitor in Rust Terminal](https://thenewstack.io/building-a-real-time-system-monitor-in-rust-terminal/) Oct 15th 2025 7:05am, by Tinega Onchari [Dogfooding and platforms: Spotify’s agentic-first development](https://thenewstack.io/dogfooding-and-platforms-spotifys-agentic-first-development/) Apr 16th 2026 12:55pm, by Jennifer Riggins [Is your internal platform ready to keep up with AI-accelerated development?](https://thenewstack.io/is-your-internal-platform-ready-to-keep-up-with-ai-accelerated-development/) Apr 16th 2026 6:07am, by TNS Staff [Claude Code and the rise of personal software](https://thenewstack.io/claude-code-and-the-rise-of-personal-software/) Apr 15th 2026 1:30pm, by Jessica Wachtel [Anthropic's redesigned Claude Code desktop app lets you burn through tokens even faster](https://thenewstack.io/claude-code-desktop-redesign/) Apr 14th 2026 5:43pm, by Frederic Lardinois [Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex are merging into one AI coding stack nobody planned](https://thenewstack.io/ai-coding-tool-stack/) Apr 12th 2026 8:56am, by Janakiram MSV [Go Experts: 'I Don't Want to Maintain AI-Generated Code'](https://thenewstack.io/go-experts-i-dont-want-to-maintain-ai-generated-code/) Sep 28th 2025 6:00am, by David Cassel [How To Run Kubernetes Commands in Go: Steps and Best Practices](https://thenewstack.io/how-to-run-kubernetes-commands-in-go-steps-and-best-practices/) Jun 27th 2025 8:00am, by Sunny Yadav [Prepare Your Mac for Go Development](https://thenewstack.io/prepare-your-mac-for-go-development/) Apr 12th 2025 7:00am, by Damon M. Garn [Pagoda: A Web Development Starter Kit for Go Programmers](https://thenewstack.io/pagoda-a-web-development-starter-kit-for-go-programmers/) Mar 19th 2025 6:10am, by Loraine Lawson [Microsoft TypeScript Devs Explain Why They Chose Go Over Rust, C\#](https://thenewstack.io/microsoft-typescript-devs-explain-why-they-chose-go-over-rust-c/) Mar 18th 2025 7:00am, by David Cassel [In the AI age, Java is more relevant than ever](https://thenewstack.io/in-the-ai-age-java-is-more-relevant-than-ever/) Apr 8th 2026 5:30pm, by Mary Branscombe [Java 26 lands without an LTS badge. Here's why developers should care anyway.](https://thenewstack.io/java-26-performance-ai/) Mar 18th 2026 9:35am, by Darryl K. Taft [62% of enterprises now use Java to power AI apps](https://thenewstack.io/2026-java-ai-apps/) Feb 10th 2026 12:58pm, by Darryl K. Taft [BellSoft bets Java expertise can beat hardened container wave](https://thenewstack.io/bellsoft-bets-java-expertise-can-beat-hardened-container-wave/) Jan 26th 2026 3:00pm, by Darryl K. Taft [Java Developers Get Multiple Paths To Building AI Agents](https://thenewstack.io/java-developers-get-multiple-paths-to-building-ai-agents/) Dec 26th 2025 7:02am, by Darryl K. Taft [TypeScript 6.0 RC arrives as a bridge to a faster future](https://thenewstack.io/typescript-6-0-rc-arrives-as-a-bridge-to-a-faster-future/) Mar 14th 2026 9:00am, by Darryl K. Taft [WebAssembly is everywhere. Here's how it works](https://thenewstack.io/webassembly-is-everywhere-heres-how-it-works/) Feb 25th 2026 11:00am, by Jessica Wachtel [Wasm vs. JavaScript: Who wins at a million rows?](https://thenewstack.io/wasm-vs-javascript-who-wins-at-a-million-rows/) Feb 22nd 2026 6:00am, by Jessica Wachtel [Arcjet reaches v1.0, promises stable security for JavaScript apps](https://thenewstack.io/arcjet-reaches-v1-0-promises-stable-security-for-javascript-apps/) Feb 14th 2026 7:00am, by Darryl K. Taft [How WebAssembly and Web Workers prevent UI freezes](https://thenewstack.io/how-webassembly-and-web-workers-prevent-ui-freezes/) Feb 7th 2026 9:00am, by Jessica Wachtel [Who will maintain the web when PHP's veterans retire?](https://thenewstack.io/php-web-skills-hiring-age/) Apr 16th 2026 2:53pm, by Darryl K. Taft [Will AI force code to evolve or make it extinct?](https://thenewstack.io/ai-programming-languages-future/) Mar 22nd 2026 6:00am, by David Cassel [Java 26 lands without an LTS badge. Here's why developers should care anyway.](https://thenewstack.io/java-26-performance-ai/) Mar 18th 2026 9:35am, by Darryl K. Taft [TypeScript 6.0 RC arrives as a bridge to a faster future](https://thenewstack.io/typescript-6-0-rc-arrives-as-a-bridge-to-a-faster-future/) Mar 14th 2026 9:00am, by Darryl K. Taft [Nearly half of all companies now use Rust in production, survey finds](https://thenewstack.io/rust-enterprise-developers/) Mar 6th 2026 10:45am, by Darryl K. Taft [How to build an AI-powered private document search app with RAG, ChromaDB, and memory](https://thenewstack.io/build-rag-document-search/) Apr 10th 2026 12:00pm, by Teri Eyenike [In the AI age, Java is more relevant than ever](https://thenewstack.io/in-the-ai-age-java-is-more-relevant-than-ever/) Apr 8th 2026 5:30pm, by Mary Branscombe [OpenAI acquires Astral to bring open source Python developer tools to Codex — but details are still fuzzy](https://thenewstack.io/openai-astral-acquisition/) Mar 20th 2026 7:33am, by Meredith Shubel [Python virtual environments: isolation without the chaos](https://thenewstack.io/python-virtual-environments-isolation-without-the-chaos/) Feb 16th 2026 7:00am, by Jessica Wachtel [Statistical language R is making a comeback against Python](https://thenewstack.io/statistical-language-r-is-making-a-comeback-against-python/) Feb 12th 2026 2:57pm, by Darryl K. Taft [Nearly half of all companies now use Rust in production, survey finds](https://thenewstack.io/rust-enterprise-developers/) Mar 6th 2026 10:45am, by Darryl K. Taft [Wasm vs. JavaScript: Who wins at a million rows?](https://thenewstack.io/wasm-vs-javascript-who-wins-at-a-million-rows/) Feb 22nd 2026 6:00am, by Jessica Wachtel [Open source USearch library jumpstarts ScyllaDB vector search](https://thenewstack.io/open-source-usearch-library-jumpstarts-scylladb-vector-search/) Feb 5th 2026 12:00pm, by Jelani Harper [The 'weird' things that happened when Clickhouse replaced C++ with Rust](https://thenewstack.io/the-weird-things-that-happened-when-clickhouse-replaced-c-with-rust/) Feb 4th 2026 7:26am, by B. Cameron Gain [Async Rust: Pinning demystified](https://thenewstack.io/async-rust-pinning-demystified/) Jan 26th 2026 11:00am, by Anshul Gupta [From clobbered drafts to real-time sync](https://thenewstack.io/real-time-sync-engine/) Apr 14th 2026 10:00am, by David Moore [TypeScript 6.0 RC arrives as a bridge to a faster future](https://thenewstack.io/typescript-6-0-rc-arrives-as-a-bridge-to-a-faster-future/) Mar 14th 2026 9:00am, by Darryl K. Taft [Mastra empowers web devs to build AI agents in TypeScript](https://thenewstack.io/mastra-empowers-web-devs-to-build-ai-agents-in-typescript/) Jan 28th 2026 11:00am, by Loraine Lawson [Inferno Vet Creates Frontend Framework Built With AI in Mind](https://thenewstack.io/inferno-vet-creates-frontend-framework-built-with-ai-in-mind/) Dec 10th 2025 11:00am, by Loraine Lawson [JavaScript Utility Library Lodash Changing Governance Model](https://thenewstack.io/javascript-utility-library-lodash-changing-governance-model/) Nov 1st 2025 7:00am, by Loraine Lawson 2025-08-31 06:00:11 Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS [Linux](https://thenewstack.io/category/linux/) / [Tech Culture](https://thenewstack.io/category/tech-culture/) # Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS Kernighan shared his thoughts on what he thinks of the world today — with its push away from C to more memory-safe programming languages, its hundreds of distributions of Linux — and with descendants of Unix powering nearly every cellphone. Aug 31st, 2025 6:00am by [David Cassel](https://thenewstack.io/author/destiny/ "Posts by David Cassel") ![Featued image for: Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, Distros and NixOS](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2025/08/088e8bf4-83-year-old-brian-kernighan-laughs-at-vintage-computer-festival-east-2025-1-1024x681.png) “I’m still teaching at Princeton,” 83-year-old [Brian Kernighan](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/) recently told an audience at the [InfoAge Science and History Museums](https://www.infoage.org/) in Wall, New Jersey. “I have not yet retired!” A geek legend for his contributions to Unix at Bell Labs — and for co-authoring, in 1978, [the definitive guide](https://www.pearson.com/en-us/subject-catalog/p/c-programming-language/P200000000368/9780137460847) for the [C programming language](https://thenewstack.io/thenewstack.io/introduction-to-c-programming-language/) — Kernighan was invited to speak at the “[Vintage Computer East” festival](https://vcfed.org/vcf-east-2025/). And last month the videos were uploaded to YouTube, showing that his talk ended with a unique question-and-answer session that turned almost historic… Besides a fun, fond look at the glory days of OS innovation, Kernighan shared his thoughts on what he thinks of the world *today* — with its push away from C to more memory-safe programming languages, its hundreds of distributions of Linux — and with descendants of Unix powering nearly every cellphone. “I’m going to make this as informal as I can,” Kernighan promised his audience, answering their questions for nearly half an hour. And besides being informative and insightful, it was clear that Kernighan — and his audience — were having a lot of fun… ## Rust Replacing C? It was a moment for the ages. “Do you think there’s any sort of merit to Rust replacing C?” one audience member asked, [a frequent topic on TNS](https://thenewstack.io/code-wars-rust-vs-c-in-the-battle-for-billion-device-safety/). “Or is this just a huge hype bubble that’s waiting to die down?” TRENDING STORIES In a world that’s been earnestly transitioning for years to more memory-safe languages, the answer from a long-time booster of C — for over half a century — promised to be nothing short of iconic. “Ohhh, Rust,” Kernigham said, to audience laughter. ‘”I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt,” he said. “And I found it a — *pain…* I just couldn’t grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn’t even an issue!” Yet his biggest complaint about Rust seemed to be its performance — an especially damning complaint from a man whose early career started on a 16-bit PDP 11/20. ![Digital\_PDP11-20 front panel - IMG\_1498\_cropped - Creative Commons via Wikipedia - author Rama and Musee Bolo](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2025/08/366730fb-digital_pdp11-20-front-panel-img_1498_cropped-creative-commons-via-wikipedia-author-rama-and-musee-bolo-1024x480.jpg) Speaking of Rust, Kernighan said “The support mechanism that went with it — this notion of crates and barrels and things like that — was just incomprehensibly big and slow.” “And the compiler was slow, the code that came out was slow…” All in all, Kernighan had had a bad experience. “When I tried to figure out what was going on, the language had changed since the last time somebody had posted a description! And so it took days to write a program which in other languages would take maybe five minutes…” It was his one and only experience with the language, so Kernighan acknowledged that when it comes to Rust “I’m probably unduly cynical. “But I’m — I don’t think it’s gonna replace C right away, anyway.” ![83-year-old Brian Kernighan laughs at Vintage Computer Festival East (2025) — hands up](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2025/08/1351be12-83-year-old-brian-kernighan-laughs-at-vintage-computer-festival-east-2025-hands-up.png) ## What’s a Distro? Kernighan was also asked one question that really put him on the spot. “What’s your favorite distro?” As the audience laughed, Kernighan smiled knowingly, and then feigned naivete about this new world with [more than one distribution](https://thenewstack.io/choosing-a-linux-distribution/) of a Unix-like operating system. (“*What’s* that word?!”) But then he said honestly that while he uses a Mac, it’s only to open a bunch of terminal windows “to whatever Linux system the computer science department is running at any given moment. And I don’t even know what it is. So, uh — sorry! I can’t be more helpful than that.” But another question seemed deeply steeped in the lore of forgotten programming languages. “Given your pioneering role with C, are you familiar with the derivative [Holy C](https://holyc-lang.com/)?” It’s an exotic variant of C written by the [late Terry A. Davis](https://thenewstack.io/the-troubled-legacy-of-terry-davis-gods-lonely-programmer/) for his homegrown bible-themed operating system TempleOS. HolyC (mixing source code with x86\_64 assembly code) can still compile into x86\_64 assembly code. ![TempleOS screenshot](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2018/09/a7a4ac27-templeos_4.05_session-released-into-public-domain-by-terry-davis.png) As the audience laughed, Kernighan smiled and said “the short answer is no.” But “the slightly more extended answer is: Does this show up on web sites like [*99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall*](https://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/)?” (The long-running site shows how the song’s lyrics would be printed in 1500 different programming languages — but alas, HolyC is not one of them.) And when another questioner asked Kernighan for his thoughts on the [package manager Nix](https://thenewstack.io/nixos-a-combination-linux-os-and-package-manager/) and the [NixOS](https://nixos.org/) distribution, a pattern became clear. “God, it’s *another* one I’ve never heard of,” Kernighan said with a laugh. He clarified later that “I think I’ve heard it, but I don’t know anything about it, so I can’t give you an answer.”) ## Yesterday and Today During his talk Kernighan remembered the overall environment at Bell Labs fondly, calling it cooperative, collegial, and fun… “It was great fun to hang out with these people.” ![Multics slide - 83-year-old Brian Kernighan laughs at Vintage Computer Festival East (2025) - hands up](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2025/08/48e69d34-multics-slide-83-year-old-brian-kernighan-laughs-at-vintage-computer-festival-east-2025-hands-up.png) But he also remembered that after [Microsoft Windows](https://thenewstack.io/bill-gates-paul-allen-and-the-code-that-started-microsoft/) came along, the whole world of technology changed, and “a lot of effort, focus, and talented people started to work in the PC world…” Kernighan remembered that “the good ideas and the talented people sort of drifted away, to some extent — or even a lot — from Unix.” And there was “much more of a focus on interaction,” because Microsoft was making consumer products (not meant for “a technical population), Though he also reminded the audience that the world then saw the development of Linux, which “keeps this legacy of Unix alive.” So how does he feel about the consumerization of Unix today? That was another question asked, with Mac/iPhone/iPhone users using its descendants without even knowing it — and “deviating so far from the original free, open source philosophy.” “I think you hit the nail on the head,” Kernighan replied, “when you said that most people don’t know it…” He noted that iPhones are running a “fairly long-path-of-evolution version of Unix,” while Android phones “are running a different flavor there of Linux underneath all of that…. I think from my side, as just — you know, somebody who was involved loosely in the early days — and has a phone — I find it intriguing. “And I also find it kind of irritating that underneath there is a system that I could do things with — but I can’t get at it!” And his audience laughed and applauded again… One questioner even pointed out that Kernighan “has effectively been involved in software for the life of software as a commercial thing.” But that also means he’s also lived to see it become commercialized and “productized”. So “do you have any hot takes on the current state of software as it exists today…? Kernighan smiled slyly — as his audience laughed again — as the questioner added, “10 words or less, if you can!” “A lot of it sucks…!” he said, to audience applause. “Unfortunately, it’s all too true.” And then he added, to his questioner, that “I could elaborate. But maybe offline…” ## Kernighan vs. Vibe Coding During his presentation, Kernighan had said one legacy of Unix was “programs that write programs”. “A compiler creates assembly language…? That’s a program writing a program… And once you get it right, programs that write programs do a good job. They do it often better than people do.” But then, hearing his words out loud, he quickly added a caveat. “I will pass over what’s happening with large language models…” As the audience laughed, he continued, “Because my few attempts on that have kind of invalidated what I just said!” ![83-year-old Brian Kernighan shows Jurrasic Park's Unix line at Vintage Computer Festival East (2025) ](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2025/08/837dab46-83-year-old-brian-kernighan-shows-jurrasic-parks-unix-line-at-vintage-computer-festival-east-2025-hands-up.png) As the talk drew to a close, someone asked for his advice for future generations of programmers. It’s a question he’s been answered before, and his first response was to acknowledge that “the answer to that — the real answer — is ‘I don’t know.'” But of course, he had more to say. And there was something affirming in this Unix pioneer’s thoughtful answer. “I think probably computers in useful forms, where you could be doing things with them, will be with us for a very, very long time.” “It may be that most people will not really realize the extent to which what they do is controlled by software that runs on hardware that uses a communication system. But *you*, if you do this stuff, *will* know that. And I think that will give you something to do that will be interesting — and probably actually *employable*, for some time in the future.” He had one more thing to say. Though it’s become a cliche, Kernighan told his audience that “if this stuff turns you on, do it. Okay…? I think you can do that kind of stuff, and you can have a good time, and you can probably make a living and enjoy what you’re doing… “I think doing stuff that you find intriguing is the way to go.” [YOUTUBE.COM/THENEWSTACK Tech moves fast, don't miss an episode. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to stream all our podcasts, interviews, demos, and more. SUBSCRIBE](https://youtube.com/thenewstack?sub_confirmation=1) Created with Sketch. [![](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2023/11/82081813-7zddypfe_400x400.jpg) David Cassel is a proud resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, where he's been covering technology news for more than two decades. Over the years his articles have appeared everywhere from CNN, MSNBC, and the Wall Street Journal Interactive... Read more from David Cassel](https://thenewstack.io/author/destiny/) SHARE THIS STORY TRENDING STORIES SHARE THIS STORY TRENDING STORIES TNS DAILY NEWSLETTER Receive a free roundup of the most recent TNS articles in your inbox each day. 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Readable Markdown
“I’m still teaching at Princeton,” 83-year-old [Brian Kernighan](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/) recently told an audience at the [InfoAge Science and History Museums](https://www.infoage.org/) in Wall, New Jersey. “I have not yet retired!” A geek legend for his contributions to Unix at Bell Labs — and for co-authoring, in 1978, [the definitive guide](https://www.pearson.com/en-us/subject-catalog/p/c-programming-language/P200000000368/9780137460847) for the [C programming language](https://thenewstack.io/thenewstack.io/introduction-to-c-programming-language/) — Kernighan was invited to speak at the “[Vintage Computer East” festival](https://vcfed.org/vcf-east-2025/). And last month the videos were uploaded to YouTube, showing that his talk ended with a unique question-and-answer session that turned almost historic… Besides a fun, fond look at the glory days of OS innovation, Kernighan shared his thoughts on what he thinks of the world *today* — with its push away from C to more memory-safe programming languages, its hundreds of distributions of Linux — and with descendants of Unix powering nearly every cellphone. “I’m going to make this as informal as I can,” Kernighan promised his audience, answering their questions for nearly half an hour. And besides being informative and insightful, it was clear that Kernighan — and his audience — were having a lot of fun… ## Rust Replacing C? It was a moment for the ages. “Do you think there’s any sort of merit to Rust replacing C?” one audience member asked, [a frequent topic on TNS](https://thenewstack.io/code-wars-rust-vs-c-in-the-battle-for-billion-device-safety/). “Or is this just a huge hype bubble that’s waiting to die down?” TRENDING STORIES In a world that’s been earnestly transitioning for years to more memory-safe languages, the answer from a long-time booster of C — for over half a century — promised to be nothing short of iconic. “Ohhh, Rust,” Kernigham said, to audience laughter. ‘”I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt,” he said. “And I found it a — *pain…* I just couldn’t grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn’t even an issue!” Yet his biggest complaint about Rust seemed to be its performance — an especially damning complaint from a man whose early career started on a 16-bit PDP 11/20. ![Digital\_PDP11-20 front panel - IMG\_1498\_cropped - Creative Commons via Wikipedia - author Rama and Musee Bolo](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2025/08/366730fb-digital_pdp11-20-front-panel-img_1498_cropped-creative-commons-via-wikipedia-author-rama-and-musee-bolo-1024x480.jpg) Speaking of Rust, Kernighan said “The support mechanism that went with it — this notion of crates and barrels and things like that — was just incomprehensibly big and slow.” “And the compiler was slow, the code that came out was slow…” All in all, Kernighan had had a bad experience. “When I tried to figure out what was going on, the language had changed since the last time somebody had posted a description! And so it took days to write a program which in other languages would take maybe five minutes…” It was his one and only experience with the language, so Kernighan acknowledged that when it comes to Rust “I’m probably unduly cynical. “But I’m — I don’t think it’s gonna replace C right away, anyway.” ![83-year-old Brian Kernighan laughs at Vintage Computer Festival East (2025) — hands up](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2025/08/1351be12-83-year-old-brian-kernighan-laughs-at-vintage-computer-festival-east-2025-hands-up.png) ## What’s a Distro? Kernighan was also asked one question that really put him on the spot. “What’s your favorite distro?” As the audience laughed, Kernighan smiled knowingly, and then feigned naivete about this new world with [more than one distribution](https://thenewstack.io/choosing-a-linux-distribution/) of a Unix-like operating system. (“*What’s* that word?!”) But then he said honestly that while he uses a Mac, it’s only to open a bunch of terminal windows “to whatever Linux system the computer science department is running at any given moment. And I don’t even know what it is. So, uh — sorry! I can’t be more helpful than that.” But another question seemed deeply steeped in the lore of forgotten programming languages. “Given your pioneering role with C, are you familiar with the derivative [Holy C](https://holyc-lang.com/)?” It’s an exotic variant of C written by the [late Terry A. Davis](https://thenewstack.io/the-troubled-legacy-of-terry-davis-gods-lonely-programmer/) for his homegrown bible-themed operating system TempleOS. HolyC (mixing source code with x86\_64 assembly code) can still compile into x86\_64 assembly code. ![TempleOS screenshot](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2018/09/a7a4ac27-templeos_4.05_session-released-into-public-domain-by-terry-davis.png) As the audience laughed, Kernighan smiled and said “the short answer is no.” But “the slightly more extended answer is: Does this show up on web sites like [*99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall*](https://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/)?” (The long-running site shows how the song’s lyrics would be printed in 1500 different programming languages — but alas, HolyC is not one of them.) And when another questioner asked Kernighan for his thoughts on the [package manager Nix](https://thenewstack.io/nixos-a-combination-linux-os-and-package-manager/) and the [NixOS](https://nixos.org/) distribution, a pattern became clear. “God, it’s *another* one I’ve never heard of,” Kernighan said with a laugh. He clarified later that “I think I’ve heard it, but I don’t know anything about it, so I can’t give you an answer.”) ## Yesterday and Today During his talk Kernighan remembered the overall environment at Bell Labs fondly, calling it cooperative, collegial, and fun… “It was great fun to hang out with these people.” ![Multics slide - 83-year-old Brian Kernighan laughs at Vintage Computer Festival East (2025) - hands up](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2025/08/48e69d34-multics-slide-83-year-old-brian-kernighan-laughs-at-vintage-computer-festival-east-2025-hands-up.png) But he also remembered that after [Microsoft Windows](https://thenewstack.io/bill-gates-paul-allen-and-the-code-that-started-microsoft/) came along, the whole world of technology changed, and “a lot of effort, focus, and talented people started to work in the PC world…” Kernighan remembered that “the good ideas and the talented people sort of drifted away, to some extent — or even a lot — from Unix.” And there was “much more of a focus on interaction,” because Microsoft was making consumer products (not meant for “a technical population), Though he also reminded the audience that the world then saw the development of Linux, which “keeps this legacy of Unix alive.” So how does he feel about the consumerization of Unix today? That was another question asked, with Mac/iPhone/iPhone users using its descendants without even knowing it — and “deviating so far from the original free, open source philosophy.” “I think you hit the nail on the head,” Kernighan replied, “when you said that most people don’t know it…” He noted that iPhones are running a “fairly long-path-of-evolution version of Unix,” while Android phones “are running a different flavor there of Linux underneath all of that…. I think from my side, as just — you know, somebody who was involved loosely in the early days — and has a phone — I find it intriguing. “And I also find it kind of irritating that underneath there is a system that I could do things with — but I can’t get at it!” And his audience laughed and applauded again… One questioner even pointed out that Kernighan “has effectively been involved in software for the life of software as a commercial thing.” But that also means he’s also lived to see it become commercialized and “productized”. So “do you have any hot takes on the current state of software as it exists today…? Kernighan smiled slyly — as his audience laughed again — as the questioner added, “10 words or less, if you can!” “A lot of it sucks…!” he said, to audience applause. “Unfortunately, it’s all too true.” And then he added, to his questioner, that “I could elaborate. But maybe offline…” ## Kernighan vs. Vibe Coding During his presentation, Kernighan had said one legacy of Unix was “programs that write programs”. “A compiler creates assembly language…? That’s a program writing a program… And once you get it right, programs that write programs do a good job. They do it often better than people do.” But then, hearing his words out loud, he quickly added a caveat. “I will pass over what’s happening with large language models…” As the audience laughed, he continued, “Because my few attempts on that have kind of invalidated what I just said!” ![83-year-old Brian Kernighan shows Jurrasic Park's Unix line at Vintage Computer Festival East (2025) ](https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2025/08/837dab46-83-year-old-brian-kernighan-shows-jurrasic-parks-unix-line-at-vintage-computer-festival-east-2025-hands-up.png) As the talk drew to a close, someone asked for his advice for future generations of programmers. It’s a question he’s been answered before, and his first response was to acknowledge that “the answer to that — the real answer — is ‘I don’t know.'” But of course, he had more to say. And there was something affirming in this Unix pioneer’s thoughtful answer. “I think probably computers in useful forms, where you could be doing things with them, will be with us for a very, very long time.” “It may be that most people will not really realize the extent to which what they do is controlled by software that runs on hardware that uses a communication system. But *you*, if you do this stuff, *will* know that. And I think that will give you something to do that will be interesting — and probably actually *employable*, for some time in the future.” He had one more thing to say. Though it’s become a cliche, Kernighan told his audience that “if this stuff turns you on, do it. Okay…? I think you can do that kind of stuff, and you can have a good time, and you can probably make a living and enjoy what you’re doing… “I think doing stuff that you find intriguing is the way to go.” [YOUTUBE.COM/THENEWSTACK Tech moves fast, don't miss an episode. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to stream all our podcasts, interviews, demos, and more.](https://youtube.com/thenewstack?sub_confirmation=1) Created with Sketch.
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Languageen-us
AuthorDavid Cassel
Publish Time2025-08-31 13:00:11 (7 months ago)
Original Publish Time2025-08-31 13:00:11 (7 months ago)
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