Brian Kernighan

Kernighan worked at Bell Labs through the Unix years. He did not create C or Unix, a point he is careful to make himself, but he articulated them: The C Programming Language, written with Dennis Ritchie in 1978, is the book that defined how programming books are written — short and without waste.

He wrote AWK with Al Aho and Peter Weinberger, along with parts of the document preparation tooling. His observation on debugging still holds: since debugging is twice as hard as writing the code, anyone writing code as cleverly as they can is by definition not clever enough to debug it. He teaches at Princeton.