Trip to See Brian Kernighan

Professors Briggs and Armstrong took a group of students to Johns Hopkins University to see a talk by Brian Kernighan (one of the original authors of C and Unix). He was speaking on "The Changing Face of Programming" and it turned out to be a very interesting talk. The main focus was on programming languages and how they change as the applications we build change. As the discipline moves from software that resides in individual devices to web-based applications, the features required by a language change dramatically. On the way home, the discussion continued with how this shift in application-type could also affect the demands on the operating systems we develop.